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MISSION GARDEN,- SANTA BARBARA. FRONTISPIECE. 



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LD 
(^ALIFORNIAN [)aYS 



JAMES STE:KIvE 



ILLUSTRATED. 



N^^ COPYRIGHT ^^"'^- >^ 

^DEC S01889' ) . / 



CHICAGO: 

BELFORD-CLARKE CO. 
1889. 



CoPVRIGHl, 1889, 

BELFORD-CLARKE CO. 



CONTENTS, 



Chapter. Page. 

I. The Brief Story, 9 

II. A Scrap of History, 15 

III. The Beginning and the End, 34 

IV. A Memento of the Old Days, .... 51 
V. San Juan Capistrano, 70 

VI. The People OF THE Adobe, 97 

vii. The Old and the New, 120 

viii. A Connecting Link, 132 

IX, Some "Argonauts," 147 

X. Nooks and Corners, 1C4 

XI. An Old Diary, 182 

XII. The Original Californian, 199 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Subject. Page. 

Mission Garden, Santa Barbara, . . , Frontispiece 

A Country Family, 177 

A Dilapidated Corner, 80 

A " Mestizo," 173 

An Argonaut, 153 

An Indian Who Staid Converted, 169 

Baby and Cradle, 221 

Before the Railways, 147 

Between New and Old : — A Corner in Los Angeles, . 97 

Contemplation, 128 

Digger and Wife, 193 

Franciscans of Santa Barbara, 123 

From the Peninsula, 205 

Indian Types :-:-Apache Children 209 

Indian Types: — Pueblo School-Girl, . . . .213 

Indian Types: — Yuma Children, 217 

In the 50's, 159 

Mission Built of Adobe, 108 

Mission Indians of Today, 135 

MojAVE Girl, 223 

7 



Viii ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Subject. Page. 
No Gospel Then or Now, 14^ 

Old Adobe Walls, 115 

Pueblo Girl, 201 

Sea Going Boat of the Time of Leif the Lucky, . . 21 

Ship of Cabrillo's Time, 23 

The California Desert, . . . . . . . 34 

The Corridors, 87 

The Descendant of a Mission Soldier, .... 164 

The Digger's Antifode: — A Pueblo Woman, . . . 199 

The First Palms, 14 

The First Settler, 120 

The Mother Mission: — San Diego, .... 187 

The Old Gate OF .THE Garden, ...... 103 

" The Original Californian," 182 

The Reformer of His Time, 30 

The San Gabriel Bees, ....... 57 

The Universal Roman Tower, 50 

" They Made no Mistakes": — California Missmx and 

Valley 39 

What the Missionaries Found, 42 

What the Missionaries Left, 224 

Wine and Wassail, 72 



CHAPTER 1 



THE BRIEF STORV 







'/ii. 



fm^': 



n 



'-7 



■vll 



T7 VERY land has its 
story ; a story in 
the telling of which 
there are two distinct 
methods. One way 
includes only the question of 
what are called "resources^'; 
the things that are present 
today, and will increase or 
decline tomorrow, and which 
interest the average Ameri- 
can accordingly. The other 
is misty, intangible, historical, a hovering phantom 
whose presence is not visible, but which is neverthe- 
less always there, an abiding legacy to whoever shall 
come, an influence not to be avoided, a mist such as 
that with which time has dimmed the colors of an 
old painting; not intended, but something which to 
all beholders belongs to the picture. 

This story may be divided into periods, of which, 
in respect to California, there are manifestly three. 
First, there is the old time of the Missions, part of 
the scheme of Spanish conquest, imparting a certain 
coloring which nothing more practical and modern 
will ever entirely wash out. Second, the American 
romance of the Argonauts; a romance not any more 

9 



lO THE BRIEF STORY. 

intended than the first, but one of the most thrilling 
in history, producing a new development of the 
m3^riad Saxon character as evolved on this continent. 
It is only forty years old. Men are living who took 
part in it. Yet it has gone into history as a distinct 
romance, scarcely considered in any other light, but 
illy to be spared from the story of American progress, 
or the pages of that unpractical but indispensable 
literature which time builds, which every nation owns, 
and which in time comes to be considered a legacy 
and possession as sacred as the monuments that com- 
memorate any species of human glory. The third 
period must of necessity be described by a word 
which culture condemns and refinement refuses to 
recognize. It comprises the time at which the Amer- 
ican re-discovered the climatic secret of the Spaniard. 
It is the period of the " Boom.^' 

The time has not come for any description of this 
last, though its remarkable results are seen on every 
hand. The time must come when an attempt will be 
made to formulate into some degree of compactness 
and tangibility the dead-and-gone sensations of the 
people whose singular experience it was to witness 
with their very eyes all the processes of the making 
of an empire : an Oriental empire, that grew like the 
exhalations of a night; by the rubbing of a lamp; 
by an incantation; full of miracles; substantial, yet 
covered with mystery and clothed upon with a gar- 
ment not heretofore worn by any form of American 
life. It is a period when the most brilliant exploits 
of financiering, the wildest dreams of speculation, the 
most extravagant pretensions, the most striking forms 



THE BRIEF STOR V. I I 

of assertion, are covered by an accomplishment here- 
tofore marked only by the lapse of painful years; by 
a visible achievement heretofore only known in the 
passage of centuries. The sunshine covers it all with 
a yellow glory. The winterless year wreathes it with 
garlands. It might be a corner of Algiers. On its 
coast invisible spirits sing, ^' come unto these yellow 
sands." Nature has made it the domain of the always 
afternoon; enterprise and race have turned it into a 
hive whose hum is ceaseless. Blue mountains fence 
the horizon, and its valleys smile in a kind of Biblical 
peace whose restfulness does not touch the modern 
soul. The home of the cypress and myrtle, its very 
air that of the old lands where in all ages the human 
soul has dreamed, there are yet neither garlands nor 
dreams. 

The first of these periods can only be recalled by 
bringing together the shreds and ravelings of a his- 
tory which covers several centuries, yet the memen- 
toes of it dot the Californian landscape as strangely 
as though old Spain had been awakened with a new 
population amid her orange-groves and gray walls; 
with new water in her mossy sluices; with a new lan- 
guage and a strange religion. Thoroughly in keeping 
with the landscape, but strangely at variance with all 
artificial surroundings, the crumbling towers of these 
ancient temples keep one all the time wondering if 
this be any lawful portion of the great American inher- 
itance, and perhaps one sometimes wishes them en- 
tirely out of the way. Daily the incongruity between 
the then and the now becomes more striking, and 
daily the crumbling walls remind more strongly of a 



12 THE BRIEF STORY. 

modern usurpation of what was meant for other uses. 
So long as they shall stand there is a feeling that it is 
not entirely a Saxon country. Flowers and eternal 
summer are not the natural surroundings of the race. 
The arts of irrigation, the culture that is Egyptian, 
the vegetation that knows no autumn tints and falling 
leaves, the exotic odors that burden the air, the brown 
hills that can never be white with snow, the eternal 
yellow sunshine and blue haze; these things have 
never, in the history of civilization before, been the 
lawful and permanent property of those whose ances- 
tors have been the brethren of white winter and the 
hardy nurselings of storms and cold. 

There should rather be the tinkling of vesper-bells 
across long reaches of pasture lands. There should 
be flowing garments, and brown faces, and black eyes, 
and maidens with red roses in their braids. There 
should be old-world songs, and rustic dances, and the 
dim faint tinklings of guitar-strings in the night. 
There should be processions, and wayside crosses, and 
all the simple ways of a people who do not learn or 
change, who believe what they are told, and who are 
content with what has been for a thousand years. 
There should be laden asses traversing rocky moun- 
tain paths, and dusty footmen who hope sometime to 
reach their journey's end content, and women who sit 
and spin in open doorways, and the brown robes of 
friars, and the shovel hats of priests; and over all 
that sweet content unknown in American life. 

And even here such things have been. It was pri- 
marily because the country was like Spain that they 



THE BRIEF STORY. I 3 

were. They seemed permanent. There was no por- 
tent of any change. The Spanish tongue and faith 
were firmly planted amid surroundings so natural 
that the only difference was that they were better. 
There was absolute isolation. The sea was on the 
one hand and a wide wilderness on the other. The 
names were of all the dear saints and saintesses of 
times beyond the Moor, before the crusades, or the 
Armada, or Martin Luther. The Virgin, Nuestra 
Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, had this new realm 
of roses for her own, and they gave her fresh garlands 
every day. The Alcalde was here with his tasseled 
staff, and the soldier with his casque and his clumsy 
musket, and the crone with her herbs and her gossip, 
and the young man with his sombrero and his mous- 
tache, and the girl with her eyes and her rebosa. No 
land the Spaniard found in all his wanderings suited 
him and was made for him so nearly as this. 

And he lost it first of all, and so easily. It was 
first by a real-estate transaction of the shrewd Ameri- 
can, known as the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, and 
secondly by the discovery of that which first, after 
mother church, has ever been the Spaniard's ruling 
passion, gold. The evil fate which timed the sequence 
of these events must be taken as part of the Span- 
iard's lot on this side the sea. He has gone, and the 
mementoes of his brief and picturesque time are solely 
those Roman towers which time is throwing down, 
and the mouldering crosses that stand above unnamed 
graves. The coming of these unheralded ambassa- 
dors of Christ; their conquering of savage tribes as 
though by a necromatic spell; was wonderful. Their 



H 



THE BRIEF ST OR V. 



broken-hearted flitting was almost tragic. But in 
neither case were they intentionally making history, 
and he who seeks to know the details of one of the 
great stories of human endeavor must delve almost 
blindly. 




THE FIRST PALMS. 



CHAPTER II. 

A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 

PERHAPS it might more properly be called a want 
of history, for in the earlier annals of this unique 
republic the scrap referred to is never mentioned. 
Hale, Barnes, Quackenbos, Hassard, Bancroft, John- 
ston, Frost, Scudder — go through the endless list of 
elementary and abbreviated histories as far as you 
will — and you will find all the earlier facts succinctly 
stated in their order. All but this, perhaps in its way 
the most interesting of all. Every school-boy knows 
Captain John Smith to an extent of intimacy that 
entirely prevents his somewhat hypothetical exploits 
from becoming mixed with those of any other of his 
innumerable namesakes. Pocahontas and her adven- 
tures is as familiar as Cinderella, and almost as true. 
Sometimes the more prominent of the Pilgrim Fathers 
are known by name, and in many cases a distinct 
relationship is claimed with them. One immortal 
Spaniard claims precedence in the school-boy idea; 
poor old Ponce de Leon, who for the fountain of 
youth found the Okeechobee swamps, and for fabled 
wealth and eternal life a grave in the Mississippi. 
Nothing can be more familiar than all the men and 
perils of those early beginnings, the whys and where- 
fores of them, and the momentous and enormous 
results that immediately followed or have since grown 

out of them. 

15 



I 6 A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 

For they pertain to the eastern coast; to the Saxon 
side. They are interesting because they are of us 
and our affairs. There is an egotism of which we are 
not conscious, and of which we often accuse others, 
which has sometimes caused us to forget that the 
American continent has more than one side. 

It has distinctly two, and the early beginnings of 
the western coast form a curious parallel with those of 
the eastern. To trace this parallel may not be unin- 
teresting save to those who view even history from a 
race and personal stand-point ; to whom the pictur- 
esque is nothing and the practical all. Many of the 
curiosities of American history seem to have been 
lost sight of. Few reflect that there are sixty million 
people on this side the sea who speak the Spanish 
tongue, and least of all is it remembered that the 
motive that brought the winning and abiding civili- 
zations alike to the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts was 
a religious one. The cupidity that planted James- 
town failed, but the zeal that nourished itself amid 
the bleak sterility of a country sparsely inhabited 
even by the Indians, lived. So the gold-hunting 
Spaniard died around the tattered banners of innumer- 
able expeditions, but the Franciscan survived. It 
was the church of Paul that came to the East; that 
of Peter lived its day of zeal and died its lingering 
death in the West. Each begot a certain civilization, 
the chiefest characteristics of which still remain, 
opposed eternally, one to be finally and utterly 
obliterated by the other. The rivalry and struggle 
are of these times, for in the beginning they knew 
nothing of each other. A thousand leagues of what 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. I J 

is now the most splendid empire the world has ever 
seen lay unexplored between them, unknown to both. 
The Puritan saw his immediate surroundings ; the 
Franciscan only his. But alike on both coasts was 
the seed of civilization planted in toil and tears, and 
nourished with prayer and blood. 

The parallel does not begin with civilization and 
settlement only, but goes back even to discovery; 
with Leif the Lucky on the one hand, and one Juan 
Rodriguez Cabrillo on the other. The first was an 
event so dim in the past that until very lately it was 
not recognized as an historical fact at all, and the 
last follows it at an interval of only some five hundred 
years. The world was then wholly wrapped in that 
deep sleep which may be likened to the slumbers of 
infancy. The flight of eventless centuries did not 
count. For all that happened between, these two 
events might have followed each other immediately. 
In fact, all that did happen was that western voyage 
of Columbus which has linked his name forever with 
the greatest event in history. Yet it might be said, 
not without argument and dispute, but with as much 
reason and fairness as history ordinarily shows, that 
it is to Leif and Cabrillo we owe it all. Vinland and 
its successive settlements and abandonments, and 
New Spain with its fruitless expeditions and discour- 
aged adventurers, are neither of them myths. From 
the story of Leif did Columbus obtain the idea which 
sustained him in what was so long considered the 
original inspiration of his genius, and from Cabrillo 
and his lonesome voyages in wider and still less famil- 
iar waters than those of the Atlantic, came finally 
the wonderful story of California. 



1 8 A SCR A r of HIS tor ) '. 

For Columbus visited Iceland in 1477, and doubt- 
less obtained surprising ideas from those mouldy 
records which were in existence long enough before 
and after his death to rob him of a portion of his 
fame. He was like many a more recent inventor in 
that he possessed the faculty of practical adaptation, 
at the moment when the sleeping world was awaken- 
ing from that lethargy which is itself one of the 
unexplained wonders of history. The son of Eric 
the Red did not perceive the import of the adverse 
winds and the torn sails which cast him unwilling 
upon New England shores. Yet his kindred, and not 
those of Columbus, have finally made America what 
it is. Philip III. of Spain was one of those who do 
not forget, and when after Cabrillo came the English- 
man, Drake, in 1578, naming the country New Albion, 
he grew jealous and sent a mariner named Vizcaino 
to explore the country. He did this, and made a 
report on parchment which was doubtless duly filed, 
and which staid in its distinguished pigeon-hole for a 
hundred and sixty-seven years. As for Drake, all 
English-speaking people have been in the habit of 
regarding him as a great navigator and explorer. 
Viewed from another side he was nothing of that 
kind. Reputable Spanish records speak of him as a 
pirate, and an intelligent Castilian will grow warm 
upon the point to this day. His offense consisted 
apparently in the very common modern one of impu- 
dence — it was the '' New Albion '' business that con- 
signed him to infamy. Yet he never knew that 
Cabrillo had preceded him in the bay of San Diego, 
into which, and out of which, each one sailed in turn, 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 1 9 

each as unconscious as the other of the remote results 
of his lonely find on those shining western shores. 

As in the case of Leif 's discovery, where at inter- 
vals of a few years various settlements were made and 
each in turn abandoned, Cabrillo's early find bore 
fruit. How many expeditions to '* Las Californias " 
were organized, how many never returned, what suf- 
ferings and disappointments they endured, will never 
be known. They all failed like the settlements of the 
Danes and Swedes on the Atlantic coast. They both 
lacked the motive of those two opposing yet identical 
religions which burned like fire in the bowels of their 
adherents, which carried them through perils and 
punishments like those of Paul, and which made them 
glory in peril and martyrdom. The Pilgrims faced 
the wilderness with an obstinacy inherited by their 
sons and daughters ever since, and the Franciscans 
amid cactus, rock, alkali and sage had no less a long 
series of vicissitudes and perils. It is true that the 
religious motives of the two settlements were differ- 
ent. One sought " freedom to worship God '^ for 
themselves; the other freedom to make others wor- 
ship according to the dictates of an imported con- 
science. Both largely failed in these intentions, the 
result being in both instances to found a civilization 
in which religion can hardly be said to be either a 
foundation or a ruling motive. But it was the 
inspiration of the Cross in either case that furnished 
the motive for the two early struggles most prominent 
in the annals of a continent. 

For they were times so inconceivably curious that 
no modern man or woman can form an adequate 



20 A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 

conception of them. Years and centuries were but as 
days. Reforms were unknown except as connected 
with the two forms of the Christian faith; forms so 
virulent that each was to the other worse than ''hea- 
thenesse;" an object of hatred such as in later times 
can not be engendered by the mere differences of 
opinion inevitable among men. Yet religion was the 
great power of the world. It was to believe all, and 
undoubtingly, that men lived. There was no science. 
Stories of inconceivable magnitude w^ere readily 
believed, and tales of colossal proportions implicitly 
relied upon. The w^orld was fiat. The sun moved. 
Stars fell. Electricity was merely the quality of 
rubbed amber. Gravitation, co-existent with the uni- 
verse, was an idea not to be evolved for hundreds of 
years, and the circulation of the blood had not yet 
occurred to any man. There were "gorgons, and 
hydras, and chimaeras dire." A personal devil walked 
the earth unabashed and uncontrolled for four cen- 
turies after these times, and in despite of him there 
were undoubted miracles wrought among the faith- 
ful ; miracles that all believed in on peril of their 
souls. Literalism w^as an implacable ghoul that 
claimed victims from every class. Then were born 
those beliefs whose descendant beliefs are not yet 
eradicated, and which tie the human race to the past. 
Yet they were the times of learning, even of 
scholarship. Asceticism, the rapt attention of a soul 
to theories, has never thriven so well before or since. 
Alchemy claimed its disciples by the score, and an 
universal solvent was as nearly on the eve of real- 
ization as levitation is now. Knowing nothing, 



A SC/HAF OF HISTORY. 



21 



Stupidity as to truth and gullibility as to theory and 
assertion were the rule. To have brains, to reason, 
was to be a magician, and to be burned or to be 
famous accordingly. There was a passion for travel, 
and a thirst for the barbarous glory which came of 
self-reported adventure and research. The first time 
that the word "California^' is known to have been 
used is as the name of a wonderful island. It is in a 
wild old Spanish narrative published at Seville in 




SEA-GOING BOAT OF THE TIME OF LEIF THE LUCKY. 

15 lo, and is there referred to as being "on the right 
hand of the Indies." The place was peopled with 
Amazons and Griffins, and the said women were black. 
Some reader of this narrative remembered it, and 
gave it certainty by being present when the country 
was actually discovered, for it was an age when a little 
story like that, told by a reputable man and having 
every internal evidence of probability, impressed 
itself upon the hearer. 

Out of this dull and stupid mass of universal 
ignorance and credulity drifted Leif the Lucky, son 



2 2 -^t SCA'AP OF JIISTOKY. 

of Eric the Red, on one coast, and out of it came 
Cabrillo on the other. Between . the two sailed 
Columbus advisedly, for he knew the luckless history 
of the lucky one. Both the former went here and 
there in frail vessels over unknown seas, kept by the 
Virgin or Odin as the case might be, and guided by 
a magnetized bit of metal hung by a thread held 
upon occasion with the thumb and finger. How 
little they knew of the results of their wanderings 
may be guessed by the fact that Columbus, the only 
purpose-guided mariner of the three, died after his 
third voyage without in the least knowing what he 
had discovered, or having heard the name of either 
Columbia or America, or being aware of the simple 
fact that Cuba is an island. 

California is the child of Spain, and Spain of the 
sixteenth century is a more interesting study than 
she has ever been since. It is a matter of unceasing 
astonishment how far the old dominion of her 
conqiiistadores spread, and how wide are even now the 
influences and results they have left behind. The 
first European who ever looked upon the wide plains 
that lie between the East and the West, or studied, 
doubtfully, the ashen flood of the Missouri, or saw 
the ancient homes of the Pueblos, or made his for- 
gotten grave amid the cactus and sage, was a 
Spaniard. She was the greatest maritime power of 
the world, and she combined with this the fact that 
she had more religion than all the world beside. 
This made an unique combination when we come to 
consider it, for she early adopted rules which pre- 
vented the embarcation of any heretic, or relatiye of 



A SCKAP OF HISTORY. 



23 



a heretic, to her countries beyonJi'sea. She proposed 
to keep them uncontaminated, and, when the rule 
was violated she punished the evil-doer with fines 
and whippings, often with both. Only natives of 
Spain proper were permitted to travel as passengers 




SHIP OF CABRILLO S TIME. 



to these new countries, and in 1662, a little time after 
California came into her hands, the punishment for 
so much as going on board an '' India " ship without 
the necessary vouchers was seven years in the 
galleys. 



24 -^ SCRAP OF in STORY, 

One can not but think with amused surprise of the 
ship, either Cabrillo's, or Drake's, -or Vizcaino's, which 
lumbered into the harbor of San Diego fifty or a 
hundred years apart in those good old times. She 
was round-bowed and square-sterned, of at most 
some three or four hundred tons, and so bad a sailor 
that one wonders how she ever came at all. She was 
a stately craft, her decks loaded with towering struct- 
ures at each end having a height equal to a fourth 
of her length. The sides " tumbled home," as sailors 
say, so that her greatest width was below the water- 
line, and her least on deck. She could not carry 
even her lower sails with a stiff breeze. If she was 
of 400 tons her average length was less than seventy 
feet, while an American vessel of 150 tons is now 
more than that. She sailed sidewise almost as well 
as forward, and she pitched and rolled and strained 
continually. She had two masts, and her bowsprit 
was as long as the mizzen. In her adornment and 
fittings she attained a luxury to which even a Pull- 
man car is a stranger. The poop and forecastle were 
rich with carvings and emblazonry of armorial bear- 
ings, and the stern and quarters flamed with paint 
and gold. She had balustrades and galleries whereon 
aristocratic passengers disported themselves until the 
first hard blow broke them to pieces. Even the sails 
were ornamented with allegorical figures, and from 
every available projection streamed flags and pen- 
nants from twenty to eighty yards long. She was 
manned by some fifteen officers and seventy or eighty 
men, besides experts to work the guns, and a com- 
pany of soldiers. The most important person on 



A SCRAP OF 1/ IS TOR Y. 



25 



board was the pilot, though he was third in rank, and 
he had charge of the course of navigation and the 
actual handling of the ship. Yet, as late as 1550, it 
was understood that he was fully competent, after a 
civil-service examination, if he could read the sailing- 
orders and v/rite his own name with a rubrica under 
it, after a Spanish fashion still imperative. He cost 
thousands of lives as an institution, but should not be 
too much blamed when it is remembered that it was 
a time when scholars considered America to be 
undoubtedly India, that the Antilles were a part of 
the main land, and that Greenland was an immediate 
adjunct of eastern Siberia. The life of a sailor on 
board one of these floating palaces was that of a dog; 
that of a passenger of an outcast. There were vermin, 
bilge-water, rolling, pitching, cramps, quarrels 
between the two pilots, guessing as to where they 
were. Three hundred souls were frequently on 
board such a vessel, and they guessed themselves 
across the Atlantic, and around Cape Horn, and up 
the long Pacific coast, and it was thus that California 
was discovered. What was called " ship fever " was 
a common thing in those days. Thus sailed the 
great Armada, and the men who cowed and scattered 
it, English sailors, were allowed to rot and starve in 
the streets of Margate by their queen, the stately and 
stingy Elizabeth. 

Those were the palmy days of the pirates. There 
were whole fleets of them. They lay in wait for every 
straggling galleon, and often they took them as often 
as they came to them, fighting if necessary. Ships 
sailed generally in convoys and fleets, and there was 



26 A SCR A P O F HIS TOR ) '. 

great ceremony. They saluted each other all the 
time. There was more powder fired away in cere- 
mony than in fighting, and when the time of fighting 
came there was nothing to do it with. And the fleets 
almost always became scattered. A gale which now 
would produce no uneasiness whatever would then 
scatter, dismast or sink a whole fleet of galleons. 
They collided and ran into each other. A West 
Indian ''norther " meant certain destruction to every- 
thing afloat. Lost galleons were counted not by 
names, but by hundreds. There was war with Eng- 
land. It lasted a quarter of a century. The English 
did not have any better ships, but they hated " Spain 
and popery,'^ and they had the Britannic lust for Span- 
ish gold. Here began that decay of Spanish power 
which has been the puzzle of historians. The Inqui- 
sition through several generations killed off the think- 
ing and studious class at home, and the ocean storms 
and the English killed the active and athletic class at 
sea. They were both recognized factors of destruction 
even at the time. South America, the Antilles, Las 
Californias, had Spanish emigrants by the thousand. 
Though only a portion of these survived, they never 
returned. They were the wonderful seed of that 
miraculous planting whose fruitage yet survives, mak- 
ing the whole of South America practically Spain, 
and coming up on this continent to the extent that 
about one- third of it was theirs until very recent 
times. This Spanish occupation was possessed of a 
virility capable of being supplanted only by Saxon 
blood. It is impossible to quite understand how a 
people that could so root itself abroad could so decay 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 2 J 

at home. As before stated, the customs, the laws, 
the language and the religion of Spain are the inher- 
itance of some sixty millions of people on this side 
the sea at the beginning of the twentieth century. It 
is so striking a fact that every detail and reminis- 
cence of its beginnings is of interest. Cortez, De 
Balboa, Ponce de Leon, Narvaez, De Soto, Pizarro, 
and later, but not least, the Franciscan Friar, Padre 
Junipero Serra, w^ere men with great hearts and 
steady purposes, undaunted by anything the un- 
charted seas or the unfriendly shores might bring. 
Actuated by the love of God, or the love of gold, 
their conduct was in the same line, heroic every day. 
The last man, the Saxon, has taken California and 
made it what it is to-day. ♦ He has taken what he was 
pleased to call a desert, and has checkered it with 
railways, and starred it with electric lights, and dotted 
it with villas. His domes and gilded spires stand 
out among the green foliages his hand has planted, 
and through the morning mist shines his starry ban- 
ner. It is his, but his occupation lacks the element 
of heroism, a heroism and toil he does not pretend to 
understand or care about. Thither has he brought 
the traditions of Plymouth Rock and the legends of 
Boston Bay or the James River, and perliaps some- 
thing of his inner life is fed by them. Yet there is 
another history in whose traditions he must share. 
He must remember that the ''stern and rock-bound 
coast " had its parallel on this, the opposite side, and 
on such traditions does his Californian greatness 
stand. It is a history strangely mingled with that 
sunshine and romance which goes everywhere with 



28 A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 

the Spanish people. It was embodied in religious 
endeavor, in missionary zeal, and such written mem- 
orials of it as there are, are found in musty docu- 
ments that smell of the cloister and are larded with 
pious ejaculations. For, to repeat, it was religion, a 
pious motive, a zeal for Christ, that finally brought 
the men who came and staid, to either coast. They 
were wide apart. Each one would have prevented 
the other if he could, yet the result was in each case 
the same. The only difference is this: the Spaniard, 
the Franciscan, would never have crossed the conti- 
nent — the Puritan did. Sunshine, the olive and the 
vine, were the natural surroundings of the one. 
Rocks, the gnarled oak, hard winters, a sterile soil, 
toil, and the little palisaded church in the woods 
whither the worshiper went with his gun, were those 
of the other. An awful creed and a frowning God 
nerved the Puritan to the vicissitudes of duty. A 
beautiful and glorified woman, queen of the Angels 
and Mother of Christ, beckoned the other. The very 
climate of the two contrasting civilizations would 
mark the difference, and it is here remarked, to be 
contradicted, of course, and yet stand among the 
striking probabilities, that, people it as you will, unite 
it with the East by still more continental lines, let its 
people come from wheresoever, it is not the width of 
a continent, but a million miles that separate it from 
Puritanism, and an uncongenial soil wmII never nour- 
ish here to vigor the faith that conquered New Eng- 
land. 

Following somewhat loosely the story of Spain 
and England in the sixteenth century, it is necessary 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 2g 

to refer to matters a little precedent but intimately 
connected with the subject. For it was the founding 
of the sect that founded California that is especially 
referred to. The great motive in men's affairs was in 
Europe for several centuries a religious one. They 
were all continuously engaged in making the world 
morally, or rather piously, better. Success seemed 
imminent every day of those old days, and all hea- 
thenesse was very soon to come under the banner of 
that faith which, to say truth, has caused more misery 
and tears and blood, more longing and penances and 
prayers and wasted endeavor, than a thousand para- 
dises could compensate. The priest went everywhere, 
and he and the soldier camped together beside all the 
lonely streams, and on the margins of the desert, on 
every shore where wind and current cast the caravel, 
or galleon, or open boat. Every ceremony that 
marked the landing of the tireless wanderers on a 
new coast included the planting of the cross, and 
thenceforth that land became a province of Christen- 
dom, and its benighted people came under a new law 
whether they would or no. The spread of the true 
faith was either the motive or the excuse for the push- 
ing of enterprises and the promotion of expeditions 
which otherwise the commercial instinct would have 
condemned, capital in those days being '* timid," as 
it is now. , This was the power which Columbus 
brought to bear at last upon the mind of Ysabella 
Catolica, and through her upon her husband. It has 
been surmised that he would have been more easily 
successful if his theory had not involved the heresy 
that the world was round, whereas, in the case of 



30 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 



Leif, it did not matter to Odin or to Thor if it were 
round or flat. But pious thoughts at last prevailed, 
and the enterprise was patronized even at the risk of 
upsetting the accepted Biblical cosmos. 

The religious idea that governed everything pre- 
vailed for a period quite beyond the historical con- 
ception of men of these days; say something like a 
thousand years. About A. D. 
1 200, or thereabouts, it occurred 
to a priest to establish a new 
order of friars. They were, 
to say truth, quite plentiful 
already. Orders in black and 
gray were everywhere, and the 
Jesuits had already begun to 
call down upon themselves the 
wrath of the temporalities. But 
this Francisco d'Assisi com- 
bined singular holiness with 
great powers of mind, and 
through him arose the great 
order of mendicant priests 
called Franciscans, or Fratres 
Minores^ Minorites. The order 
was invented to bring about a reformed strictness in 
monastic ways. There were too many jolly ones, and 
a certain rubicund rotundity had become a reproach. 
There were Tucks in Italy and Spain as well as in 
England. Everybody agreed that the rules of Saint 
Francis were too strict for human frailty, and could 
not be successfully enforced. Even His Holiness had 
such a doubt, but at last consented to issue the writ, 




THE REFORMER OF HIS 
TIME. 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 3 1 

so to speak, and let reforms come if they would. There 
was a general opinion that they were badly enough 
needed. The final result, coming after the lapse of 
centuries, is that Francisco d'Assisi is one of the 
immortal names of all history, sacred or profane. He 
was the founder of an order of ecclesiastical tramps 
whose feet have wandered upon every coast, whose 
brown habit has weathered every clime, whose corded 
waist and crucifix have mingled with every uncon- 
verted crowd, and whose poverty has never starved in 
any land. 

Mediaeval Europe perhaps owes more to the Fran- 
ciscans than to all other agencies, and in 1209 was 
born, and for a long time flourished, a spirit which 
has now passed away from human affairs. They went 
everywhere and were felt in everything. Among 
them there were great names. The author of the 
Stabat Mater was a Franciscan, and so was he who 
wrote the Dies Irae ; and among those of the gray 
robe and sandaled feet were Roger Bacon, Duns 
Scotus and Bonaventura. 

In 1720, or thereabouts, a young man named Juni- 
pero Serra belonged to this already famous order. A 
fever like that of his father, St. Francis, was in his 
veins, and to convert the heathen was his longing and 
his continual prayer. His history will not be given 
here, and it is enough to say that he is truly the 
patron saint of California. It would not only be no 
impropriety, but would be a fitting and proper thing, 
if his statue should be set by Protestant hands in 
every Californian town, and his heroic story told 
in every public school. Whatever his immediate 



32 A SCR A 2' OF HISTORY. 

successors may have been, he was himself one of the 
few exemplifications among men of the power of that 
higher leading which sometimes glorifies a human 
life, and then departing lets the sordid ages pass with 
full churches, but without a single example to shadow 
forth the Nazarene. 

Following his longing, Serra eventually found 
himself in Mexico with three companions of his sect. 
A hundred and seventy years had passed since the 
exploration of California by Vizcaino, and the coun- 
try, pertaining to the realm of mediaeval fable still 
save for his casual observation of its coast, was again 
almost forgotten. Expeditions not guided by faith 
or religion had gone there during those years, but 
like those which followed Leif on the eastern coast 
had accomplished nothing, or had never returned. 
There were Indians there, heathens, and it seems to 
have been the full intention of the Franciscan to visit 
and convert them when he left first his native shore. 

The first Saxon settlement of territory within the 
present United States may be considered to have been 
at Jamestown, in May, 1607. The Puritans landed at 
Plymouth in 1620. They had a hundred and forty- 
seven years the start of the California movement, for 
it was not until 1767 that the Jesuits were expelled 
from the peninsula of California, their church prop- 
erty given to the Franciscans, and Serra's opportunity 
given him. The spot selected was that which had 
become known through the survey of Vizcaino, then, 
as now, called San Diego. For it must, to comply 
with the piety of those times, be San or Santa some- 
thing. The name is the same with St. James, or 



A SCRAP OF HISTORY. 33 

James (Santiago), who is the patron Saint of old 
Spain, and whose name has for centuries been the 
Spanish war-cry and talisman. His "day^' is the 
i2th of November, and that was the date of Vizcaino's 
arrival. Thus the place and the huge county as large 
as a State in which it lies, lost forever the fleeting 
title of New Albion, and became, even to the Saxon, 
the legacy of Spain. 

From this 12th of November, 1602, that which now 
is known as South, or Southern, California, became 
Alta or "upper" California. The people of those 
times knew little or nothing of all that we include 
under the name. They were very ignorant of its 
resources when they lost it, nearly two and a half 
centuries later. But what they considered to be 
theirs extended without limit or boundary upward, 
downward and sidewise in all directions. Certain in 
the correctness of their intentions, the certainty of 
their tenure and the perpetuity of their rule, they did 
not investigate. Time is nothing to a Spaniard. 

So it was to San Diego that the Franciscan and 
his companions came. It is so»easy to say they came, 
and so easy to do it now, that it is difficult to appre- 
ciate that aw^ful journey. The soldier and the priest 
came together, as usual, and the conquest was one of 
Church and State combined. There was an under- 
standing, expressed' or implied, but afterward conven- 
iently insisted upon, that the contemplated missions 
should remain missions only, and exist for that pur- 
pose exclusively, for a period of ten years, and after 
that become civil communities. They existed in full 
vigor for more than fifty years. 



CHAPTER 111. 



THE- BEGINNING AND THE END. 




A WOMAN who has the 

fortune to live within 



^ "^ a stone's-throw of one of 

■ the old missions said to 

^- ;>4 the writer: I do not know 

THE CALIFORNIA DESERT. J^^,,. -^ J^ ^hat theSe bllild- 

ings became so dilapidated. They are not so very 
long deserted, and in the seventeen years that I have 
been beside this one not a single stone has changed 
in the least. It is precisely as it was when we came. 
If there is any indication of a singular fatality 
about these sole remaining monuments of the early 
times of California, there is also about the story of 
their building. Everybody has been pleased to speak 
of Serra who has ever touched the subject at all, 
but they have also been pleased to stop when they 
have said but a very little. A sort of fragmentary 

34 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 35 

biography was from time to time written of him by 
his friends and brother monks, but the record seems 
to be so meager as scarcely to afford more than a 
glimpse of a character which must nevertheless be 
considered a remarkable one. Men do not see the 
future, and are unwilling to trust their guesses in 
regard to it. All but a few, whose confidence never 
fails. One of these latter was Junipero Serra. He 
was nineteen years in Mexico before he came to 
California, and for most of that time was in the out- 
lying regions of that country engaged in missionary 
work. When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 from 
what we now call Lower California, he was fifty-six 
years old, and was then but just entering upon a sup- 
posed realization of the dream of all his life. He was 
not a doubter of either human or divine truths. 

There were sixteen persons in the land party 
with which Serra was. There was still another land 
party, and two more were to go by sea in two ships. 
None of the four parties knew anything about it. 
They were taking the chances that a part of some one 
of them would get there. A man of those times 
named Galvez had charge of the outfitting and prac- 
tical part. It was to him that California is to this 
day indebted for a considerable addition to the 
resources found when, after seventy-nine years, an 
eminently enterprising people became interested. 
He ordered the carrying of the seeds of everything 
that would grow in Spain, together with two hundred 
head of cattle. Of these came the herds that were 
afterward so much at home, and of the seeds and cut- 
tings came much that is most profitable and beautiful 



36 THE BEGINXIXG AND THE END. 

in California now. There was, besides, a very com- 
plete assortment of holy vessels, crosses, banners 
and things necessary to the uses and services of the 
church. There are even strong evidences that so 
heavy and inconvenient a thing as a church bell, sev- 
eral of them, was thought of and included. 

If the reader has any idea whatever of the country 
near the coast in South California, and of the south- 
ern part of it where it joins the peninsula of Lower 
California, and then can imagine il^^in a state of nature, 
covered with cactus and sage, crossed by a jumble of 
mountain ridges, waterless save in hidden places and 
absolutely pathless, he can have some conception of 
the rigors of this tramp from Villicata to San Diego. 
We may remember that there was a double purpose 
in it, the first of which was the colonization of Cali- 
fornia, and the bringing of it into the economy of 
Spain, and secondly, the conversion of those who, in 
the cant of that day, both Puritan and Catholic, were 
known, as by the Mormons now, as '' Gentiles." 

At the end of the written instructions of Galvez, 
which were intended to govern the expedition, he 
stated, among other things, that one of the objects 
of the enterprise was *' to protect the country from 
the ambitious views of foreign nations." This is 
very Spanish, for the beautiful wilderness of Califor- 
nia was then more utterly unknown than are now the 
scenes of Stanley's explorations in the heart of 
Africa, and probably its latest " foreign " visit had 
been that of Drake, one hundred and eighty-nine 
years before. 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 37 

Indeed, the only knowledge of where they were 
going was obtained from such record as had been 
made of the '^ survey " of Admiral Vizcaino, in 1602, 
a hundred and sixty-five years before. The two 
points that attracted especial attention were San 
Diego and Monterey, both named and described 
by him for the first time. Yet so closely was this 
first definite scheme of colonization and conversion 
planned, that there were orders to plant a mission 
and garrison first at San Diego, then at Monterey, and 
then one half-way between to be called Buena Ven- 
tura, a favorite Spanish name meaning ''good luck." 
The monks, being 'Franciscans, had thought of their 
patron, and wished to name a mission for him among 
the first, and began the journey with the information 
that if St. Francis wanted one, and would show 
them the place, he might have it. They thought he 
did, and it is known to this day, distinctly and clearly, 
as San Francisco. A hint may be given in a consul- 
tation between priests and soldiers in the heart of 
Mexico, and a couple of centuries afterward may be 
found surviving in the bustling metropolis of a peo- 
ple to whose tongue and sympathies its name is a 
stranger, and perhaps more in need of missionaries 
now than it was at the hour of its obscure baptism. 

The expedition having been divided into four 
bodies in all, Serra insisted upon accompanying one 
of the land parties, and this, seemingly, for the rea- 
son that he had a lame leg, acquired in walking from 
Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, twenty years before. 
All the degrees of martyrdom seem to have been fully 
appreciated in those times. One of the ideas of the 



38 THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 

age may be partially illustrated by the fact that Serra 
never did anything for this difficulty in all the years 
after, but either aggravated it or was indifferent to 
it. Though he immediately broke down when the 
march began, he refused to be carried, and used his 
misfortune to wonderful purpose during the remain- 
der of his life. He walked up and down the coast 
many times, and only the year before his death went 
on foot from San Bias, on the western coast, to the 
City of Mexico, a journey which is quite a feat when 
ridden, and in these times. 

The journals of that first momentous march are 
vague to the extent of being little more than pious 
ejaculations, occasionally accented by a brief statement 
of fact, studded here and there with a terse and 
enthusiastic picture included in the space of a sen- 
tence. These meager facts have been made the most 
of by all the chroniclers of the time, but almost the 
whole of the story is that it was a toilsome march 
through a cactus-grown wilderness by two small par- 
ties of men who did not know where they precisely 
were, and had no knowledge each of the other party. 
Among other facts stated in letters and journals was 
this : " It is a country where nothing abounds but 
stones and thorns/' 

It is a fact that, until very recent times, the South 
California wilderness differed generally very little 
from what is now the Colorado or Yuma desert. Irri- 
gation, the searching for, finding and using of the 
hidden springs of nature, has made the change. It 
was the desert only the Padres first knew, alkali, 
cactus, sand, sage, brown and dreary mountain ranges 



THE BEGINNING AND- THE END. 



39 



utterly unexplored, and they themselves strangers in 
the midst of the savages they came to convert. 

Had they come far, they must inevitably have 
perished, and the country would simply have lain 
still and waited for the Saxon who was the predes- 
tined heir of all, who did not wait for the Franciscans 
and their civilization, and who, when his time came, 




THEY MADE NO IMISTAKE? 



CALIFORNIA MISSION AND VALLEY. 



eighty-five years later, entered as one does who is in no 
way concerned as to who has been there before him. 
But it was not far. The present w^riter must in 
all sincerity state his entire ignorance as to precisely 
where in the upper part of the peninsula of Lower 
California Villacata was situated, but the mission- 
aries left there on March 24th and arrived at San 
Diego on May 13th. The party with which Serra 



40 THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 

was, however, did not reach there until six weeks 
later, and when they came they found everybody sick 
with scurvy, and many dead. The ships were there. 
One of them, the San Carlos, which arrived last, lost 
all her sailors but two. The San Antonio, the other, 
which sailed a month and a half later than the San 
Carlos, reached San Diego twenty days the soonest. 
There was some difficulty in finding the place. An 
age of discovery and maritime adventure could not 
furnish any better sailors than that. She also lost 
half her crew by that fatal malady, now almost 
unknown. 

Sometimes, when one has leisure to contemplate 
the examples of greatness offered by human history 
he is impressed by the paucity of those who had that 
quality which the vernacular calls levelheadedness. 
Surely in those early days of California, in the remote 
beginnings, only one man showed such a quality, and 
that was Galvez,the rnan who arranged for the cattle, 
the seeds, plants, etc., and in whose Spanish mind 
was running not so much the love of God and the 
triumph of the gospel as the aggrandizement of 
Spain. Serra, having for once left oft his missionary 
enthusiasm for a moment's attention to temporal 
facts, writes of the journey thus: "The tract 
through which we passed is generally very good land, 
with plenty of w^ater, and there, as well as here, the 
country is neither rocky nor overrun with bushwood. 
There are many hills, but they are generally com- 
posed of earth. The road has been in some places 
good, but the greater part bad. About half way, the 
valleys and banks of rivulets begin to be delightful. 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 4 1 

We found vines of a large size, and in some cases 
loaded with grapes ; we also found an abundance of 
roses, which appeared to be like those of Castile. In 
fine, it is a good country, and lery different from old 
California^ 

This letter was written July 3, 1769; No one 
knows or can guess the half-way spot described, but, 
considering the authority, it would have answered 
for a very good South California advertisement of 
about 1887. Padre Serra was an enthusiast^ He 
beat his bare breast with a stone, and burned it with 
a lighted torch, to illustrate to the Indians the pains 
and penalties of hell. But neither he nor any of his 
brethren ever made a mistake in the location of 
a mission, and they are invariably the best loca- 
tions in the California of to-day. Walking barefoot 
over those thorny miles, possessed with a burning 
desire to baptize, longing only to preach the ever- 
lasting gospel, one of the most devoted men who has 
ever'followed in the footsteps of the founder of the 
Christian faith, he yet knew where the land was 
good, where the wild grapes grew, where there were 
roses Vv'hich reminded him of those that in his youth 
he had seen in the braids of the maids of old Castile. 

The kind of man the great pioneer was may 
partially be discovered from another letter of his, 
dated at Monterey, in 1769. In this he wishes to 
know the name of the present pope, what friends 
have died, so that he may pray for them, the names 
of any newly canonized, so that he ma}' pray to them, 
and adds : " We proceed to-morrow to celebrate the 
feast and make the procession of Corpus Christi 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 43 

(although in a very poor manner) in order to scare 
away whatever little devils there may be in this land.'' 

Any one who has lived among the Mexicans may 
know that this was not a bit of ecclesiastical humor. 
They, according to the same training and belief, pro- 
ceed annually, or oftener, to ^*^ scare away the devils " 
by processions and ceremonies very well suited to 
the purpose if the fiends have any feeling or taste 
or nerves whatever. Serra was a man who believed. 
He believed it all. He had the original theological 
ideas, and all of them, which now seem so incon- 
gruous in a practical and doubting world. He 
knew. In all his days he never wavered in the idea 
that he should convert the heathen of California, and 
yet he knew nothing of the task before him. He 
was an enthusiast who remained so regardless of 
difficulty, or fact, or report, or actual demonstration. 
And there was therefore never a missionary enter- 
prise before or since so successful as this. Here are 
some data, not given from the religio-spiritual view- 
point, which was Serra's, but from the temporal one 
of his brethren and successors. 

During sixty-five years only thirty thousand Indi- 
ans are actually known to have been in the church 
at one time, and these were engaged in the mission 
establishments, kept and lodged there, and occupied 
in profitable industries. Yet the early beginnings 
grew into establishments at that time unequaled 
elsewhere, and since impossible anywhere. There 
are no reliable facts showing how many heathens 
were all the time outside and unconverted. Some 



44 THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 

have said there were 120,000. In fact their number 
has never been precisely known 

About eighty thousand is the sum-total of all the 
Indians ever buried in the Campos Santos, or conse- 
crated burying grounds, during the whole period of 
the mission establishments. If those domiciled in 
the missions, and employed there, averaged thirty 
thousand during many years, the estimate leaves an 
immense number of gentiles to bury themselves in 
the chapparal. But it leaves the consoling thought 
that this eighty thousand at least are among the 
saved. 

But the temporal side of the account is an encour- 
aging one. In 1834, when the establishments had 
begun to decay, the figures were something like 
these: 

The line of missions was about seven hundred 
miles long; from San Diego northward to the latitude 
of Sonoma. They lay contiguous and adjoining. 
Their sites were the most eligible spots of the sun- 
niest land the world knows. Their affairs were 
administered by the Padres in a manner that gives 
one the idea that some modern American enterprises, 
notably some extensive railway systems, but not by 
any inadvertence including the various "Trusts," 
would do well to go to the Church for their business 
managers. 

Seven hundred thousand cattle grazed on the mis- 
sion pastures, with sixty thousand horses and an 
immense number of other domestic animals. 

A hundred and twenty thousand bushels of wheat 
were raised annually, besides all other crops. 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 45 

The usual products came under the following 
heads: wheat, wine, brandy, soap, leather, hides, 
wool, oil, cotton, hemp, linen, tobacco, salt, soda. 

Two hundred thousand head of cattle were slaugh- 
tered annually, at a net profit of ten dollars each. 

Gardens, vineyards and orchards surrounded or 
were contiguous to all the missions except the two 
most northern ones. Dolores was considered beyond 
the Spaniard's natural temperature, and San Rafael 
and San Francisco de Solano were founded too 
nearly the end, and were strangled in infancy. Vine- 
yards, after the traditions of Spain, were especially 
relied upon for comfort, and the vine was then, as 
now, a principal feature of the country. 

The total average annual gains of the missions 
from sales and trade generally was more than two 
million dollars. This on an uninhabited and distant 
coast where commerce in our sense was unknowm. 
The value of the live-stock alone was in 1834 two 
millions of dollars. 

There was, besides all these resources, a *' pious 
fund " in Mexico, constantly accumulating, which 
had belonged to the Jesuits and was now the property 
of these missions. It amounted to two million dol- 
lars. Toward the end the Mexican government could 
not resist the temptation of borrowing from this, and 
finally General Santa Ana confiscated it bodily. It 
is to be hoped that Franciscan shades, looking over 
the battlements of heaven, may have derived some 
consolation from that sultry afternoon at Buena Vista, 
when he met his fate at the hands of a man named 
Taylor, who had no m.ore regard for military etiquette, 



46 THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 

according to contemporaneous Mexican history, than 
to fight a battle in his shirt-sleeves. 

It now appears that the Spanish government had 
a theory upon which these missions were established. 
It was that after ten years the Indians would become 
citizens, living in agricultural communities on lands 
secured to them, and self-supporting and perhaps 
prosperous. They intended to use the missions to 
this end. The final acts and decrees which secular- 
ized them s.eem to hint at this original intention, and 
to consider the time ripe for its fulfillment. The 
present conclusion is that this theory of the capacity 
of the American Indian for citizenship was a false 
one, to which there is only one exception in all the 
annals of our history. To him nothing now remains 
of all the fathers taught him. He does not remain 
himself. Through what means the remnant of him 
became what it is, may be found by reading a 
glowing chapter in Mrs. H. H. Jackson's volume, 
"Glimpses of Three Coasts." The Indian of the 
missions existed in great numbers only some fifty 
years ago. What has4)ecome of him numerically is 
a question often asked, but which no one can answer, 
except by theory. He "died off," say the oldest 
inhabitants, and there is often an opinion expressed 
that had he been left alone ; had the Franciscans 
never come at all; had the fearful American plan of 
"reservations" been at last adopted; some thou- 
sands of the original wanderers of the South Cali- 
fornian hills would still be there. Contemporary 
testimony is to the effect that he knew about as little 
as any being that ever bore the human form, and that 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 



47 



the Padres made the most of him, spiritually and 
temporally. The turning of spiritual agencies, in 
the hands of those who bore the habit and the vows 
of poverty, into skillfully conducted money-making 
establishments, has had a tendency to prejudice man- 
kind. It is amusing to study the article, "Cali- 
fornia," in the average reputable encyclopedia. The 
last one examined says : '' These zealous apostles, 
backed when necessary by armed coadjutors, planted 
various missions, bringing under their influence, such 
as it was, the great mass of the aborigines. They 
became prominent, even in Spanish America, for 
everything that could paralyze the progress of a 
community." Most commentators upon those times 
allege that the Indians were in reality slaves ; that 
they were flogged and forced in the name of religion; 
that those outside would not come into the fold, and 
those inside could not get out. It seems certain that 
when the heroic soul of Junipero Serra departed at 
Monterey, in 1784, the end for which he had endured 
and prayed was lost sight of, and the human love of 
ease and gain arose uppermost in all minds. Thus 
the briefest history of South California develops one 
of the saddest stories to be found in the annals of 
Christian endeavor. It was a work wrought almost 
in vain. There are no results. There is just a splen- 
did story spoiled, a lofty and pious life wasted, and 
the doom of a race sealed by the mere effort to civil- 
ize and save them. For hardly more than one hun- 
dred years have passed, and the few wretches one 
encounters, living in huts and wandering through 
the country at sheep-shearing time, are almost the 



48 THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 

entire visible remnants of the thousands that black- 
ened the hills to watch the entrance of the San Car- 
los, or the San Antonio, under Point Loma, or who 
ran, scared away, when the soldiers fired their pieces 
as an accompaniment of that first mass at a spot fac- 
ing the port, when the corner-stone of a fatal civili- 
zation was laid on the Western coast, on July 16, 
1769. 

Perhaps it is one of the ancient and trite stories 
of mistaken zeal, of misguided heroism. It will 
nevertheless remain ever a story worth the telling. 
The mission buildings of California, lying broken and 
deserted in the endless sunshine beneath a match- 
less sky, exhale an odor of reminiscence and inquiry. 
They are among the few monuments of a country 
that has nothing very old. Some of them have taken 
on all the melancholy beauty of moss-grown decay, 
and at nearly all the visitor questions within himself 
as to why they should have been so utterly aban- 
doned. They are incongruous with the times. They 
are ruined abbeys. They lack every personal sur- 
rounding they were intended for. Every one has a 
history that can now never be told. But the dreams 
come. One remembers that they cost money and 
infinite toil, that they were built with a skill and 
solidity, and grew into a beauty, that is of Italy and 
Spain, and not of this new land even as it is today, 
not counting the fact that all that is was then as 
undreamed of as is now an English republic in the 
heart of Africa. 

But the dreamer knows that after peril and toil 
had come rest and peace; that of the visions of a 



THE BEGINNING AND THE END. 4^ 

Spanish monk had apparently grown the most splendid 
missionary success of any age; that these people were 
at home; that the leagues to the eastward were as 
impassable as those of the shining ocean to the west; 
that there was wine, sunshine, security and isolation. 
In the then conception no change could come. It 
was the Empire of God, ruled by the Church; a form 
of patriarchal communism that was at last the earthly 
ideal of the Kingdom of Righteousness. He almost 
wishes that his lot had been cast then, and that he 
knew nothing of that which now makes up his life. 
For there still hovers about the California missions an 
atmosphere which all the winds can not blow away, 
which is unique in American life, and of which these 
ruins seem to afford the only taste. 

And then he knows that with Junipero Serra 
died all;, not only the life he individually led, but the 
life of the curious age he represented on this conti- 
nent. It was an unnatural thing this side the sea, 
and within the inevitable boundaries of that republic 
in all whose territory there are no such ambitions, 
no such hopes, no such energies, and one may quite 
as truly say, no such beliefs. 







THE UNIVERSAL ROMAN TOWER. 
50 



CHAPTER IV. 

A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DAYS. 

T^HE village of San Gabriel is only seven or eight 
miles from a city which the most prejudiced per- 
son from some other Californian locality must acknowl- 
edge to be a beautiful one, and which possesses a 
unique charm for every wanderer not to California 
born. The city blooms and booms with the newness 
of the very newest American life; the village is drowsy 
with the feeling of a perpetual afternoon. There are 
places in this strange country from which this feeling 
is inseparable, and it seems preposterous that in San 
Gabriel it should ever be called early in the morning. 
There are always long shadows and a peculiar yel- 
lowness of the atmosphere. There is a faint hum- 
ming sound as of bees. There is nothing doing. 
There is one short street crossed by another, and 
these four corners, lengthened out a little by some 
white-washed adobes that are of the olden time, is all 
there is of it. These houses have been furnished with 
" shake " roofs at some period greatly later than that 
of their original erection, and their walls are coated 
with the thickest and deadest white ever seen. But 
their windows and doors are twins of those found 
wherever the Spaniard and adobe. soil have existed 
together at any period. The walls are very thick, and 
these openings are very small. One does not step up 
to enter in, but invariably down, and with a feeling 

51 



52 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

that it would be better for him to stoop a little. In 
lieu of sidewalks, there are only crooked paths through 
the gray dust from door to door, and there is a strag- 
gling and indefinite end to every thoroughfare and 
every vista in trees and shrubbery and tangles and 
general crookedness. The voices one hears are 
almost invariably foreign, and the words are provin- 
cial Spanish. There are glimpses of shawls over 
heads, and of feet that are shod, but deplorably stock- 
ingless, and of little boys with brown faces and very 
black hair and eyes, and with only one suspender and 
always coatless. There is no wind and no noise, and 
you are sure there never was any, and that this day 
is very nearly like all the other days that have ever 
come to San Gabriel. Yet it has only taken you some 
twenty minutes to reach the place from a metropoli- 
tan depot, and if you go out to the uncertain end of 
the street you will see a mile away a big and balco- 
nied hotel, and beside this there is a street-car track. 
The first time I had ever seen the place had been 
five years before, on a summer afternoon, I remem- 
ber how the soft breeze from the west came through 
the little open depot shed, and stirred the tall weeds 
with swaying yellow heads outside, and that I could 
smell the eucalyptus trees, and that I heard that dull 
and universal drone which seems to be a sound made 
by silence. The sun shone hot and the dust lay 
thick, and there was the jerky bustle of linnets hither 
and thither, and a brown lizzard stopped at the door- 
sill and winked at me, and a chipmunk scuttled across 
the shining rail of the track beside the door with an 
impatient squeak. There was nothing in it all to 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 53 

make the least impression, yet I remembered it, and 
went back to it. 

It is the seat of a mission which in its day was the 
richest of them all; a presage of later times, since 
there is, perhaps not in all the world, a bit of soil 
quite equal to the San Gabriel Valley. It is another 
one of those cases of not making a mistake in loca- 
tion which has become proverbial. You would know 
it was one of the old places by certain signs above 
enumerated, and if you did not see the church at all, 
for there is an occasional discordant clangor of old 
bells whose tones are never those of any modern 
casting. It is one of the two or three remaining mis- 
sion churches which has a roof on it — a modern one 
of shingles — and consequently where services are 
still held. But it is, on week days at least, a service 
purely perfunctory. There are no worshipers. 
Morning mass had been omitted on this day within 
my knowledge, and the priest did not rise until ten 
o'clock, and when at last he came forth and dawned 
upon me I felt within me a prescience that when I 
came again I should not mourn if he came not at all. 
For he was the most striking incongruity I have ever 
encountered at a California mission, where incongru- 
ities are less to be tolerated, perhaps, than anywhere 
else in the world. A rasping brogue accent noted his 
first words, which were addressed to an unhappy 
man, not a priest and yet in holy orders, who was his 
and the church's servant, and they were thus: " Hoh! 
has the felley com weth thot mayl yit ?" A heavy 
shock of reddish hair grew very low on his forehead, 
and a big jaw and coarse lips made you wonder where 



54 A MEMENTO Of THE OLD DA YS. 

the impulse could have come from which led him into 
the vow of obedience, poverty and chastit}-. An old 
black coat was covered with patches of white mould 
wdiere the fungus had grown upon innumerable soup- 
spots. His face was unshorn and his eyes were red, 
and his manners exceedingly bad. I have an idea 
that he looked upon his office as a job, and upon his 
functions as occupation, and that he was not satisfied 
with his present assignment. There are Protestant 
clergymen \V:hom one assigns mentally to the office of 
a quack doctor, and I regretfully discover Catholic 
priests who seem to have made a narrow escape from 
a row of bottles, a big mirror and a long white apron. 

The ecclesiastical servitor I had already encoun- 
tered, and he was not adverse to the interview I had 
been having w^ith him. He met me at the door of the 
ancient sanctuary, and remarked with a German 
accent that it would be necessary to charge a fee for 
entering, owing to the need of repairs in the church. 
I smilingly assented and asked him to convey to me 
a vague and distant hint as to how much he con- 
scientiously thought I ought to contribute towards 
the rescuing from premature decay of the venerable 
building, and he unhesitatingly said " mens fo' bits; 
vimmen, two bits." 

I gave him a dollar in a moment of imprudence, 
and an elocutionary fervor immediately took posses- 
sion of him. I do not know if he had been accus- 
tomed to spell-bind visitors w^ith it every day, or if it 
was specially reserved for such extra occasions as 
the present, but unquestionably it had, been written 
out for him by some one, and had been duly com- 
mitted to memory by him. It abounded, as far as I 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 



55 



heard it, in graceful delineations of virginal and 
saintly character, and in passages which reminded 
me strongly in their style of some of the "lectures" 
of the lodge-room. But while he had his back to me, 
and was wavinor his hand toward the ancient imagoes 

o o 

behind the altar, I went away to one side to examine 
the worn leather of the worm-eaten old confessional 
where the Franciscans had leaned their elbows a cen- 
tury ago. To obtain possession of me and of my 
undivided attention he had to stop and come to me, 
and in the pause that ensued I asked him what he 
really had that was old to show me. He replied that 
the principal treasures of this church were undoubtedly 
the twenty-one — I think he said twenty-one — actual 
and legitimate portraits of the apostles and disciples, 
and he waved his hand around the walls to indicate 
them where they hung in a long row on each side. 
"With a countenance which probably bore every indi- 
cation of profound belief I asked him if he was sure 
they were actual portraits, and he said they were, 
" vitout ony tout fatefer." He then told me that 
they had come here, the gift of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, because San Gabriel was intended to be the 
Cathedral of California. I neglected at the moment 
to call attention to a discrepancy in his narrative of 
a little less than three hundred years lying between 
the generosity of the celebrated monarchs mentioned 
and the founding of the California missions, and so 
he went on to say that every one of them had been 
painted by Murillo — twenty-one Murillos hanging 
dilapidated and without frames on the walls of an old 
building, seven miles from Los Angeles, and yet the 



56 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DAYS. 

" boom " had been in real-estate, and not a picture 
mentioned. 

He mentioned a few moments later the fact that 
the Fathers yet remaining at .San Carlos had lately 
been obliged to sell the mission plates and utensils 
to buy bread, and I then said to him that a single 
authenticated Murillo, sold at half price, would prob- 
ably tide over any emergency the brethren might 
come to in a hard year. He said, yes, it might, but 
they didn't want to sell them ; as soon as they got 
money enough they were going to have them painted 
over! I asked by whom, and he said a gentleman 
was coming to see about it tomorrow — a very good 
painter indeed. 

In the afternoon I passed that way again, and he 
had four young men, probably from the hotel a mile 
away, in front of the altar-rail, and was going uninter- 
ruptedly through his lecture. I caught the words 
'* te most loofly of vimmen; te most anchelic of 
anchels," and sneaked out again. I do not know if he 
told them about the Murillos. That was not a part 
of the lecture, of course, and oozed out in a personal 
conversation I had with him. Perhaps it w^as not 
intended for publication, but I cannot refrain from 
divulging the fact of their existence to my art-loving 
countrymen who may find themselves in the neigh-' 
borhood. At most an inspiring view of them, in a 
fair light, only costs "four bits.^' 

This same accomplished man showed me the red- 
wood ceiling lately made to hide the rafters of the 
roof — a very decidedly modern innovation — and told 
me it had cost five thousand dollars. When it comes 



A MEMENTO OE THE OLD DA YS. 



57 



to the inherent pecuniary value of abstract sacredness, 
aside from antiquity and associations, I do not pre- 
tend to judge. It may be worth while to repair. But 




THE SAN GABRIEL BEES. 



I am of opinion that the church of the mission of San 
Gabriel could now be entirely rebuilt as it stands, 
with some modern improvements and conveniences, 



58 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

for little more than twice the sum he mentioned as 
the cost of the ceiling. He also told me that the 
government of the United States had left this mis- 
sion only four acres of land, including the cemetery. 
Others say that the ground assigned it^ and now 
valuable and rented by it, is more than forty times 
the amount mentioned. Should I ever revisit San 
Gabriel, I should feel strongly inclined to have this 
man report to me all his store of knowledge, for I did 
not really question him to any extent. We passed a 
huge stucco tomb beside the church. It lacked, as 
usual, any inscription whatever, and I asked him if he 
knew whose it was. He said, yes, it was a sea-cap- 
tain's, for all sea-captains were buried with their heads 
to the pole-star, but he did not remember the name. 
There was one black and time-worn crack in the side 
of it, out of which the bees were issuing, and the place 
smelled of honey. Stopping to ponder for a moment 
upon the uses, industrial and otherwise, to which we 
may come at last, this man said he had no doubt 
there was a great deal of honey there, for those bees 
had been there a very long time, and the place had 
never been opened, all of which was evidently true. 
But by and by some of the more pugnacious of them 
began to object to our presence, and I was forced to 
hurriedly depart. Then my chaperone said they 
never stung ///;;/; he had once taken three dollars' w^orth 
of honey out of that place and escaped free. At that 
moment his attention seemed to be violently attracted 
to a spot on the back of his neck, beneath a dilapi- 
dated blue neck-tie he wore without any collar, and he 
hurridly went away through the tall mustard-plants 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DAYS. 59 

which overgrew the place, and I had no further 
reliable information from him. 

Looking very old, but partially repaired into 
shabbiness, San Gabriel shows the least signs of its 
former importance and great wealth of any of the 
California missions. The walls and arches of the 
quadrangle are entirely gone. There is not a sign of 
the rows of cloisters. The remains of gardens and 
fountains have been obliterated. The church has no 
transept, and is but an oblong building of an aspect 
not particularly imposing. If it had towers they 
were small, for the wall shows neither angles nor 
greater thickness w^here they would have been. Per- 
haps architectural beauty was not intended, for the 
Roman arches are all wantiag, and as a peculiarity 
not noticed in most others, the outer walls are but- 
tressed to the eaves. I looked longer at a little out- 
side balcony near one end of the building than at 
any other single feature, for it seemed quite without 
any religious purpose. It was a narrow structure, 
railed neatly with iron, shadowed by an immemorial 
pepper-tree, and the steps close beside the wall by 
which it was reached were deeply worn. Perhaps it 
was the entrance to the organ-loft, or only an archi- 
tectural caprice; perhaps a place whence the Spanish 
recreations of those days could be conveniently over- 
looked. For San Gabriel had an extensive and 
famous bull-ring in its time, and while bull-fights 
may not have been directly favored by the Francis- 
cans, we must not forget that they were Spaniards, 
and there was never one of that blood whose soul 
was proof against the national pastime. 



6o A MEMENTO OE THE OLD DA VS. 

The mission was also an extensive manufactory. 
In the very yard, quite close to the church-walls, are 
still to be seen the remains of the huge furnaces and 
cauldrons w^here they tried tallow and made soap. 
Something is there also, now filled with earth and 
almost enigmatic, which looks like the pit of an ancient 
water-mill. Outside, across the road, and by me 
found by chance, are the remains of a huge cement 
water-main. It is laid above ground entirely, and 
being some four feet wide and deep,- conveyed a tor- 
rent. Perhaps nothing could recall so vividly the old 
and prosperous Salurnian days as to imagine this 
aqueduct brim-full through the midst of the shining 
valley. It seems indicative of the utter passing away of 
all these early blessings to see that the railroad, when 
it was built, cut it square across. There is water yet, 
but it comes in iron pipes. There is a hydrant at the 
corner of the old church, and cocks and troughs in the 
village street. They do not change its sleepiness in 
the least; it is only incongruous. It was better when 
it splashed and foamed, and ran in rills down the vil- 
lage street, and was played in by the urchins, and 
when the Indian girls went to the fountain with tall 
pitchers on their shoulders, and it followed the hoes 
of the Indian laborers over the low fields. In those 
days w^ater was as precious as in Biblical days it was 
in Palestine, and, as in Palestine, wherever it ran, the 
land flowed with milk and honey, and there was 
happiness unalloyed by investment ; peace undis- 
turbed by the price of land ; security that knew no 
margins; sunny years that heard no booms. 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 6 I 

There is a cemetery. Its principal feature is dilap- 
idation. This is about all that in these times any 
mission graveyard ever indicates. No graves are vis- 
ible there which extol in stately Latin the virtues of 
either convert or friar. Those are sunken, gone, 
ploughed over, utterly lost. The oldest part of this 
has been utilized for the practical purpose of raising 
oranges. That which is not so old, is a couple of 
acres of wooden crosses, all modern, but all dilapi- 
dated, with here and there a memorial of white mar- 
ble. One of these says of the sleepers, " Requies 
cant in Pace,^' and adds another unintended item to a 
long line of tombstone pleasantries. A brick mauso- 
leum near a corner of the church, seemingly old, 
has been broken and rifled, and nobody knows why 
or when. Nobody cares. Camp Santo, sprinkled with 
holy water, and the dedicated resting place of believ- 
ers only, seems in all Catholic countries to be incon- 
sistently neglected*. 

There are only four bells at San Gabriel, though 
there are hanging-places for five. Thereby, of course, 
hangs a romance. There was a seiiorita in old Mexico, 
name and date given more or less, but unimportant, 
who had a lover. He came north and died. In the 
course of masses for his soul's repose, the young lady 
sent to this mission a beautiful and costly bell. For 
a long time it hung in its niche and rang the faithful 
to prayers, and was one of the institutions of the 
place. Finally it disappeared, and there are those 
who say that it was taken down when sequestration 
came, and was returned to its donor. But a grizzled 
American says, in his practical way, " It aint best to 



62 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

believe that yarn. There was thought to be consid- 
erable silver in that bell, and some priest or other, 
don't know who, sold it. That's all." You will always 
find some member of this prosaic race on hand to 
destroy romances, little and big, and some of them 
are able to bring forward the most disagreeable and 
inconsistent conclusions. 

One of these came within my ken as I sat in the 
shade at the street corner. He was a young man 
with an old face and a gray head, friendly and hilar- 
ious, talking Spanish to all comers, and evidently a 
man of the country. He addressed me in English, 
with a strong Southern inflection, and we entered 
into conversation. He told me he came to San Gabriel 
in '49, when a boy, and had known the last days of 
the remaining Franciscans. I hinted that I should 
like to hear about the old times. He said '' there is 
nothing to tell; I can put it all into two sentences." 
I asked him to do so, and his reply was that they 
came, had any number of Indians to work for them, it 
was a good country, they grew rich, and when the 
Mexican government took their lands from them, 
they went away angry. 

This succinct summary of the situation seemed to 
him a very full one, but I remained unsatisfied. 
Insisting upon further particulars, he told me there 
were some 2,000 Indians here in 1849, ^^^ *^^ them 
having been connected in some way with the indus- 
trial operations of the missions — ranches, herds, fields, 
factories, etc. " In plain English," I said, " kindly 
answer for me one question. Were, or were not these 
Indians slaves?" 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 63 

The reader is aware that this question has been 
much discussed, and that no one seems to quite 
understand the peculiar and unique situation that is 
perhaps quite without a parallel in the long story of 
the contact of the European with the Aborigine on 
this continent. These California Indians lived toil- 
some and patient lives, and did an immense work. 
They had never worked before, and were reputed the 
most extraordinarily shiftless of all Indians. Why 
did they? Enthusiasm; readiness to believe only the 
good and reject the unpleasant; admiration for the 
heroism of those fathers who came first; — these do 
not answer the question. 

My new friend had told me that he came from a 
slave State. That he need not have done, for he spoke 
English with that accent no ear can fail to recognize. 
Knowing him but ten minutes, I still knew he would 
speak truth if he answered at all, for it was in his 
demeanor and the general look of him. Many times 
and in various forms, I had asked, or hinted, the same 
question. Elderly '' Californians " — as the California 
Spaniard is always called — have described to me at 
length the life of the missions as they had partly seen 
it and partly heard of it, and in effect have almost 
invariably led me to the conclusion of serfdom; of at 
least that form of feudalism which makes its toilers 
slaves under a politer name. Then when I would 
finally say " well, they were slaves then, were they 
not?" they would protest with an endless procession 
of vehement " no's." 

He looked at me a moment doubtfully, seeming to 
enquire my motive in the question, and then, perhaps 



64 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

remembering that the question of slavery everywhere 
is a thing of the past, slowly answered, " Well, yes, 
that's just about what they were. They got no wages 
and they made 'em work like the d — 1. What else 
would you call it?" 

" How can you make an Indian work?" I said. 

"Well, I think they scared 'em into it; — told 'em 
they'd go straight to hell if they didn't, and made 
'em believe it. Oh, they do that with others than 
Indians." This last significant remark seemed to be 
in the nature of supplementary proof, and I pursued 
the subject no further. But I bethought me of 
Father Serra's own story of the marvelous efficiency 
of one of his sacerdotal banners, that had upon one 
side a picture of the Virgin and upon the other a 
realistic representation of the old-fashioned Hades. 
I knew also that a coercion unto godliness by a means 
not very dissimilar to that of the Padres had been 
practised by the church of my forefathers, and mine, 
for many generations. But the shrewd notion of 
these missionaries in turning the powers of which 
they had control into a means of coercion to field- 
labor, was a view of the case quite new to me. 

I asked my friend what became of the Indians, and 
he answered in the same old comprehensive way; he 
said they "died off." I always asked this question 
when I could find opportunity. I wished to know 
whether there would ever be any variation in the 
answer. If there had been, I should have concluded 
that my fate had changed, and that very likely some- 
thing startling would soon occur to vary the monot- 
ony of my placid days. There was a cause for this 



J ME ME y TO OF THE OLD DA VS. 65 

Indian fatality, and a study of it leads to some con- 
clusions not usually much dwelt upon by the average 
philanthropist and enthusiast. Least of anywhere 
is it cared about in California. They are gone. The 
past is accepted with unanimity and composure. 
But it is a part of the great Indian question of this 
continent, which for a century has been an illustra- 
tion of the ancient story of the two knights who saw 
the shield from opposite sides. 

My friend declared that he had no business, never 
had had any, and was not looking for any, and inti- 
mated that this was not unusual in San Gabriel in 
his day, or even now. Whereupon I ventured to 
enquire whether the Californians, i.e., Spanish, popu- 
lation were increasing or the contrary. He gave it as 
his opinion that they were not. Upon my asking why, 
he gave me another comprehensive answer comprised 
in the words, " Well, they don't amount to much." 
Hy this he meant that they were not fitted for com- 
petitive life with the Americans, and were being 
pushed to one side. He told me presently, with 
some feeling, that his wife had been a Californian, 
that he had always been with them and knew them 
well, and that the present conditions in California 
were not understood by them. Every one of them 
could have been wealthy; few of them are. Beyond 
certain limits and restrictions no Spaniard will ever 
go. '' I am not so very old," he said, " not so old as 
I look, but I should not be surprised to see almost 
the last of them myself.'" 

He arose and went whistling away, followed by 
some half-dozen little brown-faced boys, who pulled 



66 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

him by the skirts of his coat, and clung to him by 
every available portion of his person. They were 
saying something about going fishing, and he made 
several solemn promises to them on that subject 
while still in my hearing. A man whom the boys 
love is never a fool, is almost invariably a gentleman 
in his nature, and may be counted upon to say truth if 
anything. But he may be such an one as Irving has 
immortalized. In a corner as quiet and almost as 
quaint, surrounded by every inducement to idleness 
with few of its penalties, brooded over by tradition 
and sunshine, surrounded by mountains ruggeder 
and bluer than the Catskills, I think I have encoun- 
tered the Rip Van Winkle of San Gabriel. But this 
man owned a horse and buggy, into which he man- 
aged to climb with as many boys besides as would 
have made a coach-full. Perhaps he owned a rancho, 
and I believe he did. He was Rip, but of the Cali- 
fornia variety. Onions and cabbages were the prod- 
ucts of the country of the first. Here, a hundred 
feet away, the water was foaming out of the throat of 
an iron pipe, and running away in black and shining 
furrows beneath long rows of orange trees, and vin- 
dictively nibbling at the bare feet of the laborers who 
coaxed it hither and thither with shining hoes. 

After he was gone, and I had nothing with me on 
the sunny corner to console myself withal, I began 
to think of what had come to the sons of the virile 
conquistadores who had once laid half a world under 
tribute to Espafia Madre^ that they should come next 
after the miserable "" Digger^' in their chance of early 
extinction. They are not heathens, and have not 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 6 J 

been since the names "Goth" and "Vandal " became 
familar in all the ancient stories of valor in war and 
strength in peace, or Alaric closed his palm upon the 
beauty and strength of classic Rome, and some- 
thing of a solution of the question came to me at 
the moment. Of the four village corners I have 
mentioned, three bore on the fronts that strange and 
odious tergiversation to which our American eyes are 
so accustomed that it has ceased of itself to disgust 
us — the word " Saloon." Perhaps even the fourth one 
was of similar character, and lacked only the name; 
— four small-sized gin mills facing each other in a 
village, which but for them might seem a corner of 
Arcadia, the home of simplicity and peace. I could 
hear the tipsy Spanish voices within trying to sing 
" La Golondrina," but so maudlinly that it might 
have been a Comanche chant. Spoiled by the toilless 
traditions of their ancestors, lured by the modern 
price of ranch-lands and deceived by the blandish- 
ments of a climate that robs poverty of half its ter- 
^ror, the native Californian is drinking himself into 
that imbecility which presages extermination. It is 
not alone at San Gabriel that the grusome process 
goes on. Every isolated village, every shearer's 
camp, has its continuous orgies. It is not with wine. 
The Spaniards have crushed and drunlc the red blood 
of the grape for ages, and if it has poisoned them 
they have been ver)^ slow in dying. It is the ram- 
pant fluid known as American whisky whose seduc- 
tions he has learned and whose death he tastes. 

The contrast to this, in the same sunny region, is 
the slant-eyed Mongolian. A dim suspicion must 



68 A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA YS. 

sometimes find lodgment in the mind of every visitor 
that this shrewd and toiling economist, this Asiatic 
sphinx, may sometime come forward not as a claim- 
ant, but as an actual holder of the lion's share. 
He may do everything else, and he can and still sur- 
vive, but he does not drink. A moment after the 
saloon idea had dawned upon me, I found this same 
Chinaman having it quite his own way, fearless of 
any municipal discouragement. From an adobe a 
little w^ay down the shady street I heard a sound that 
was dimly like the cackling of hens, mingled occa- 
sionally with a little human screech of triumph and 
exultation. John was at it; a dozen of him. They 
sat on either side of a long laundry-board, and the 
game they played I could not understand, and rather 
than disturb a national amusement, which had also 
the effect of lighting for the first time for me the 
stolid face of a Chinaman, I did not linger long in the 
doorway. 

For a unique mingling of some of the most diverse 
sensations of life, commend me to the village of San 
Gabriel, Archangel. Call it Gab-r^:?//, as was intended 
by its founders, or w^hat you will, you wall not find its 
equal for many a league. It stands in the midst of 
the most fertile plain of a land whose barrenness and 
whose fertility, lying side by side, have given rise to 
two distinct opinions, alternately in the majority for 
fifty years. Looking out of its embowerment, moun- 
tains fence it on every hand, and shimmering in 
changeless summer itself, a huge patch of white 
snow looks dowm on it in June. For a hundred and 
twenty years its drowsy ears have listened to the 



A MEMENTO OF THE OLD DA VS. 69 

clangor of its mission bells, and until times that must 
seem to it exceeding new, it has been accustomed to 
scenes foreign and transplanted; pictures out of the 
common life of Spain. It is still older than these, for 
here stood that group of booths and huts the 
invaders called a rancheria^ and here have lived and 
died the dusky generations of whose history or times 
or thoughts there has been left us not a word or an 
indication. Surrounded now by all that is new, by 
the improvements of the world's most restless deni- 
zens, by a skill that accomplishes in a single year 
the results of a Spanish century and an Italian eter- 
nity, it is still San Gabriel, abiding in a peace that 
is held about it by a spell. 



CHAPTER V. 

SAN JUAN C API STRANG. 

T)Y no possibility could any little chamber be more 
gloomy, unfurnished, generally dilapidated and 
desolate. A battered old pine table stood in the middle 
of the floor, and beside it a mended chair. Another, 
with a rawhide bottom, stood beside the door. There 
was no whole glass in the one window, and so the 
shutters were closed. An old and worn black priest's 
coat hung against the wall, and the cheapest variety 
of cotton umbrella leaned beside it. An ecclesiasti- 
cal book lay on the table where it had last been used, 
and close beside it a pair of steel-bound spectacles. 
The only sign of creature comfort, the one human 
weakness of the place, was a little bag of cheap 
tobacco and a wooden pipe that lay beside the spec- 
tacles and the book. 

Dust, the dust of years, decay, forgetfulness, decrep- 
itude, was everywhere. It filled the spaces of the 
cracked red tiles of the floor, and lay thick on the 
wide old window ledge. It had flown upward and 
perched on the beams of the ceiling. If one had 
swept it away it would only have alighted again, for 
it belonged there, a part of the material of the place. 
Some of it was the excretae of generations of insects, 
and some of it was composed of their powdered 
wings and heads and legs. Some again was vegetable; 
the microscopic cosmos that could tell of fungi and 

70 



SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. 7 1 

lichens; of every minute growth of beam and rafter 
the dry, bright air could nourish. 

On one side was a little lire-place ; the incon- 
gruous thing of a land where, winter or summer, the 
great sun warms the world unfailingly, yet where it 
is often cold. It was doubtless in its day good for old 
bones and slow blood when the white sea-mist would 
come creeping up the narrow valley before the early 
mass. It was, black with a hard and ancient soot, but 
it had been long since a fire had crackled there. There 
was a picture on the wall. I do not remember of 
what, but it was of something sacred, and it was very 
cheap. Perhaps, as was fitting, it was the Mother of 
Sorrows, looking upward, a lithographic sadness in her 
pleading eyes, and a hand, with a ring on the finger, 
laid upon her heart. But I know that the stains of 
time ran obliquely across her face, and that it hung 
crookedly upon the wall. 

There was little else. You could observe the yel- 
low glint of the sunshine through the wide cracks of 
the opposite unopened door; the door that had once 
opened upon a huge square that was edged with 
cloisters; that was full of dark-faced people; that 
was set with fountains, and crossed by walks, and 
studded with flowers. Its huge outline was there 
still, and on two sides still ran the pillared arches 
that had supported the roof of a porch about sixteen 
hundred feet long. Opposite every arch had been 
the low door of a monk's room; his cloister, where 
he had meditated upon the evanescence of all earthly 
things, and had told his beads, and had lain upon his 
uncurtained cot and slept as men do to whom the 




WINE AND WASSAIL. 



SA.V JUAN CAP I STRANG. 73 

Church alone is infancy and motherhood and liveli- 
hood and care and love. The roof was gone, and the 
long rows of arches stood alone. Some of them 
were broken off in the middle, and the half-arch 
still hung there, uncracked, sustained by a singular 
tenacity of material. Where yet the red floor-tiles 
remained beneath them, beside this little back-door 
of the priest's room, they were worn by the going to 
and fro of feet that have been dust this seventy years 
and more, that had had errands from this cloistered 
square to the outer world ; that were bare or clad 
only in sandals, and that mayhap had trod the thorny 
road from Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, from 
Mexico to Guadalaxara, and then to San Diego, 
in ceaseless and toilsome crossings of an unknown 
desert, and thence to this sunny spot where rose the 
now fallen towers of the mission of the soldier-monk, 
San Juan Capistrano. 

Beside the little chamber I have described, once, 
perhaps the public office or business-room of the 
mission, there was another, the bedroom. It was 
stiller and darker and sadder than the first. There 
was nothing there but a single bed, and loneliness 
and poverty. But it is not a place of ghosts, or else 
priests do not believe in ghosts. For I saw the place 
that night, as its broken arches shone in white moon- 
light at the end of the village street. I knew that 
old graves lay thick behind the church, all ivy-grown 
and all unmarked, and that there were memories and 
reminiscences in every nook and cranny. The aged 
priest may have been asleep there, alone and unat- 
tended in a little den surrounded by crumbling ruins, 



74 ^^^^ JUAN CAPISTRANO. 

but ghostly visitors do not disturb his slumbers. So 
idle, so tenantless, so out of keeping with the spirit 
of these times are these moonlit ruins, that even the 
ghosts have forsaken them. 

Just in front, in a porch whereof the roof is still 
intact, there is an old wooden settee, smooth with age 
and innumerable sittings upon it. This fronts the 
world and the public; the world and the public of the 
old times ; and there sitting, I tried to recall those 
days. It were hard to do without imagining myself 
also a Franciscan, which God wot I am not, and I had 
ill success. But down through the narrow valley — 
where runs a railroad now — I could see the shining 
sea. A faint black smoke hung trailing on the hori- 
zon where a steamer was passing. I thought it well 
enough that things should end when their time came. 
For had the towers never fallen ; had the angelus 
bells been pealing across the yellow hills; had the 
fair church whose whole interior now lay open to the 
sky been full of dusky worshipers ; had a brown- 
robed Franciscan sat beside me; I should have known 
by the smoke of the steamer and the distant scream 
of the train that that hour had arrived. The curious 
thing; the pathetic and unjoyous reflection; is, after 
all, of so much wasted toil and tears and hope and 
faith. That is what it amounts to. The eternal church 
and living faith, sole owner of a beautiful and isolated 
world; rich, strong, powerful, successful beyond hope 
in the beginning, could stand but eighty years. The 
babe who saw the beginning lived unto the very end. 
The people who came with her, and the Indians she 
converted, are gone as well. Here and there one sees a 



SA .V J UA N CA PIS TRA NO. y 5 

brown face; here and there hears the old tongue; once in 
a day, or a week, may encounter a laborer whom he 
knows to be an unmixed descendant of those amiable 
aborigines whose benighted lives stirred the soul of old 
Serra. If secularization had never taken place, if the 
Pious Fund had been piously regarded until now, if 
the presidios had paid their debts, if the enormous 
landed holdings had been left to the course of nature 
and law, all would long since have given way before 
that advent which is the opposite of that upon which 
the church is founded. This aged priest lives alone 
amid the fallen stones his brethren laid. The roof of 
his chapel is propped with a post. His coat is old, 
his vestments tarnished and shabby. He has rem- 
iniscences for his friends, and is otherwise quite 
deserted. Some lone devotee may now and then come 
and bow in succession to the faded Stations of the 
Cross that hang on the mouldy walls of what was 
once a mission granary. Some contrite soul may at 
long intervals come and whisper its sins to him through 
the rusty perforations of the worn and worm-eaten old 
confessional. A few may gather to hear the mass 
whose bells are still rung on the ancient wheel whose 
rude circumference they rim, and whose iron crank 
was once whirled by an Indian boy at the elevation 
of the host. The mi-ssion is fortunate, for at most there 
is no priest at all. Here he serves, in faith, patience 
and old age, to mark for the wandering and irrever- 
ent American, and with singular emphasis, the differ- 
ence between Then and Now. 

There is a quiet beauty often hovering over decay 
and ruin, and no locality is so subject to such a spell 



76 SA A* / fjJ A' CA 1 'IS TRA NO. 

as an old church. So to the average American, who 
came to heal his lung or his fortune, who considers 
only climate and existing facilities for irrigation, who is 
thinking only of the exigent and emphatic now, per- 
haps a California mission bears a strong resemblance 
to any decrepit structure, say a dilapidated barn. 
Another is given to reflections upon the temporal 
sagacity of the Padres, of whom he makes the old 
averment that they never got into a poor locality. A 
third merely looks and passes on, unable to rightly 
comprehend the meaning of a memento or a monu- 
ment. He says it is of the past, the '' dead " past, and 
thereupon, if he knows any poetry at all, he quotes 
Longfellow on that point. Such an one sees nothing 
but grass and rocks and rolling hills at the field of 
Gettysburg, nothing but a whimsical piece of industry 
in the bronze and homely face of Lincoln where he 
stands in a Chicago park, nothing but fact anywhere 
— the fact which is of the present, and which concerns 
him alone. 

By ascending a rickety stairs you may find all that 
is left of the library of the mission and monastery of 
San Juan Capistrano. Hardly is it a stairs at all, but a 
compromise upon a ladder, and the steps are so steep 
that the rise has been notched to slant inward, after 
the fashion of the teeth of a saw. There are books; the 
books of a time when the art of the printer flourished, 
but the binder had not acquired his modern cheap 
facility. Nearly all are bound in parchment; what we 
would call rawhide; and are of a kind that will bear 
much thumbing. The Spanish and the Latin prevail 
in this assortment. There is not a volume in the 



SA AT JUA N CA PIS TRA NO. 7 7 

English tongue, or of a date later than Seventeen- 
Hundred-and-Something. Many of them are in manu- 
script, written with a quill upon the old-fashioned 
unruled foolscap that everybody uses in Spain to this 
day. The monks were good penmen, and the ink 
was very black. You will encounter here a record of 
*' Matrimonios," the dedicatory first page of which 
was written and signed by Junipero Serra himself. 
He was seventy years old when he wrote it, and yet it 
would stand for a fine quaint specimen of pen-and-ink 
engraving. There is another old volume of exercises, 
a prayer-service for every day in the year, which is 
handsomely printed in red-and-black, and was fur- 
nished with metal clasps. This book is thicker than 
it is long or wide, and is the quaintest thing in the 
collection. You may take it in your hand with a 
smile at its clumsiness, but you remember that it was 
a thing of personal use under all the circumstances 
of those times. The edges of the leaves have been 
thumbed and turned until they are worn into notches. 
Certain favorite pages are covered with an ancient 
gum which obscures the type, and which is all that is 
left of the personality of whoever it was that carried 
it in the fold of his habit, and whispered its prayers 
to himself in the shade of the live oaks, and turned 
to it for spiritual food when his bodily stomach was 
empty. Perhaps it figured in some of those graphic 
episodes vaguely hinted at in the sparse records it 
was thought worth while to make. It may have been 
at Monterey under the oak. Perhaps it was at San 
Diego when, amid the dying and the dead, that first 
mass was said. Perhaps it was at San Gabriel when 



7 8 SAjV JUAX cap I STRANG. 

wrath was turned to adoration. One can only 
vaguely regret, for the thousandth time, that the 
secrets of the dead, and what the dead leave behind 
them, can never be told. 

Curious things are the primers; the little books of 
exercises; of the Indian children. They made them 
as they came to them- — out of rawhide. One or two 
of them were not lost or torn up, and lie here. Hardly 
less interesting are sundry long Latin essays writ- 
ten by some sophomoric monk who fed his mind on 
the silence of the wilderness, and did something for 
the enlightenment of future ages; for the perusal of 
a wanderer by rail who casually picks up his essay, 
divines that it is in Latin, wonders at the intermi- 
nable length of it, whispers to himself, '' Tu Tityre 
recubans," etc., blows some of the dust off the sheep- 
skin cover from mere force of habit, and lays it down 
again. 

But this squalid little dusty chamber was not the 
library at all. It is like all the rest; a mere modern 
makeshift. On three or four old shelves the books 
lie piled, and some of them are on the floor, or over 
on the window ledge, where they keep company with 
a dozen empty wine bottles. And there is one 
strange thing. The Padres were not making history, 
or lending any assistance whatever to that interesting 
process. In all this heap of quaint volumes there is 
nothing like a daily record, a diary, a bit of descrip- 
tion, a fragmentary record of the experiences of one 
man. No one knows precisely, or by more than a 
guess, what the real life of the missions was, how 
many Indians there were, what variety of humanity 



SAN JUAN CA PIS TRA NO. 79 

they represented, what anybody did, or said, or 
thought. Every fact has been gathered by inference 
or from outside sources, by whosoever has attempted 
the slightest sketch of those interesting times. An 
enormous work was accomplished, industrially if 
not religiously. A form of the commune was estab- 
lished which seems to have more than realized all 
modern isms and ideas of that form of political and 
industrial life. For fifty years of the life of the mis- 
sions it is impossible to conceive of the situation as 
other than a patriarchal form of Indian slavery, but 
slavery nevertheless. Yet no man knows if it was 
really so, and even this prominent feature remains 
disputed and unsettled. Toils and perils the Padres 
had, innumerable from the nature of the case, and 
often insurmountable. There is no complaining 
record to tell the story. The secrets of aboriginal 
life, the motives and desires and cunningness of the 
barbarian mind, were all laid open. The Franciscans 
knew them; there is not a word to tell of them. So 
nearly obliterated are all the details that the build- 
ing of nineteen missions, the raising of the stately 
and beautiful establishments for each one, the bring- 
ing under cultivation of thousands of fruitful acres, 
the magic coaxing of running water over miles of 
arid rock and sand to make vineyards and rose-gar- 
dens and orchards, the governing and administration 
of all through many years, the wealth acquired and 
the trade established, and finally, the sudden fall, the 
broken-hearted abandonment and complete decay of 
all; — the whole story — seems like a tale that is not 
told; a vision of the night. Perhaps no scheme of 



8o 



SA.V JUAN CAPISTRANO. 



conquest was ever so successful, and save a single 
uprising at San Diego which was forgiven and un- 
avenged, there was no blood shed through it all. 
There were soldiers, but they were few, undisciplined 
and far between. There were civil magistrates, but 
they lacked all physical power to enforce. Either the 
Indians of California, speaking different languages 
and not all alike, were the most docile savages the 




A DILAPIDATED CORNER. 



world has ever known, or Catholic and Protestant 
alike may turn to the scant record of those missions 
as a singular example of the power of the Cross, and 
of the success of those who " endure all things " for 
the love of Him who patiently endured as an exam- 
ple to whosever would conquer in His name. Whether 
it be so or not, there is no narrative to explain. 
The pioneer of forty years ago knew as much as we 
do now, and no more. Two generations have passed. 



SA .V J UA X CA PIS TRA NO. 8 I 

The Indians are gone, and the oldest inhabitant can 
not explain whither. It is a lost civilization. 

But if one will be patient, and will sit down beside 
the ruins of Capistrano, or San Luis Rey de Francia, 
or Gabriel, or any picturesque memento of them all, 
and will dismiss the world and the flesh, he may get 
himself into a mood for diml)' understanding. Here, 
where we are sitting now, the Padres came at even- 
tide, and looked through the canyon upon the sea, 
and gossipped as priests, like other men, occasionally 
will. It was the half of an open square. There was 
a rail in front to which visitors tied their horses, and 
the general gossip of the community went on as it 
must in every association formed by men. The reader 
will kindly remember that these holy men were also 
Spaniards, also that the cigarette is an ancient Span- 
ish institution, to the benign and consolatory influ- 
ences of which the priesthood has ever been amenable. 
The world belies them greatly or else monks, even 
Franciscans, -are jolly. These men were pleased. 
Their lines had fallen in places so pleasant that every- 
one has been pleased ever since. It was the land of 
oil and wine. Their granaries and casks were 
full. Their dusky neophytes numbered thousands, 
and the ideal kingdom of Faith was established per- 
manently. One could almost wish that such had 
actually, as it was apparently in those pleasant days, 
been the case, and that one had been there to see what 
now is a picture only to be recalled by such vain 
imaginings as these. 

A semi-savage origin is traceable in all one sees. 
The long rows of arches are stately only after a 



82 SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. 

barbaric fashion, wonderful as they are for the time and 
circumstances of their construction, and picturesque 
because proclaiming Spain in miniature, and coming 
by a wonderfully long road from Palestine itself. 
But they are not precisely alike. The hand of the 
Indian is visible in their curves. Some are longer than 
their fellows by a finger's breadth, and some are 
slightly higher in the bend. Among the red tiles of the 
pillars some are thick and some are thin. Symmetry, 
either of material or of architecture, is not to be 
expected of the savage of any race, and for all the pur- 
poses of picturesque decay the result answers quite as 
well. 

On the left hand, at the corner of the square, 
stood the church itself. No Protestant sanctuary 
in America, roofless for fifty years, would look as 
well. The walls are nearly five feet thick, not of 
squared blocks of solid stone, yet where standing at 
all almost uncracked. The chancel and its roof 
are still intact, showing all the proportions thac for 
their uses were well nigh perfect. To be entirely in 
keeping, there is under the round flat dome, and amid 
the ashes of the past, an open grave. What father's 
bones were disturbed by this useless sacrilege no 
one knows, and there were but bones to reward the 
delver's search. Serra was buried in the chancel 
at San Carlos, of Monterey. Some brother, whose 
name has not descended, and honored only less than 
his superior, lay here. 

There are graves enough, and all unmarked. The 
little square behind the church is full of them, and 
in a little corner are two or three whose low stucco 



SAN J UA N CA PIS TRA NO. 83 

mounds, covered wjth trailing vines, have been bask- 
ing places for the lizards from time immemorial, 
A yellow-eyed brown bird was there, interested in 
the gruesome corner to the extent of scolding vocifer- 
ously at the most distant intrusion. To be entirely 
in keeping with surroundings there was also there a 
skull. It was so huge that it was made to form a 
part of the flimsy fence that ran partly across to 
hedge in with some lazy show of care a nameless 
resting place. It was not a man's, but doubtless one 
of the few remaining mementos of their times, 
showing at least the cranial conformation of the 
mission ox. The bases of the horns, decayed and 
shrunken as they were, measured nearly eleven inches 
round. 

All the ridge upon which the mission stands is 
covered with thv remains of the establishment, and 
it was by no means one of the most extensive. There 
is a tradition that adobe is more lasting than stone, 
and that rawhide will endure longer than either, and 
these buildings were of the sun-dried bricks, whose 
permanency surprises every stranger. On the right 
of the entrance, where, in imagination, we have been 
sitting while the western sun went down into the 
sea, was the kitchen. The old oil-mill, its stone still 
in place, and the rawhide thongs which held its cross- 
beam to the uprights still hanging shrunken to the 
wood, is there now. There is a disposition always to 
try to imagine, to dimly recall, the industrial occu- 
pations of any period to which our own appears a 
striking contrast. A man would be justified in 
searching all Spain for a barber's basin such as Don 



84 SA.V JUAX CAPISTRAXO. 

Quixote mistakenly adopted as a helmet, and if we 
pry into the culinary establishment the Padres found 
sustenance in, we do but add a supplement to 
romance. But there is no guess to be made. There 
are only blackened walls to show the uses that are 
gone, and the faintest odor of garlic, even of that, 
has been wafted down the years. But there is the 
stable, somewhat useful to this day, and one gazes 
with interest at the wooden manger-bars between 
which the asses of those times pushed their mottled 
noses, and even at the square mounds, rising even 
now some three feet above the common earth, which 
show where once the goats and kine passed their 
ruminative nights. 

And there was a dungeon. Whether for priests 
or converts, it is certain that the most virtuous com- 
munity never yet existed long without one. It was 
a room behind the church, whose only openings are 
a door, still barred, and one square window, high up 
and closed with a solid shutter. Within the recollec- 
tion of elder residents, there were stocks there ; the 
ancient and effective machine which shut down upon 
the prisoner's members, and gave him a seat whose 
hardness was conducive to painful reflection upon 
the evil of his ways. It were a wonder if such sim- 
ple means were all that were needed for the disci- 
pline of the barbaric majority, and, if true, one could 
heartily wish that the climate had the same effect 
upon a later generation. 

The professional anatomist pieces together from 
scales, or wing-feathers, or claws, or thigh-bones, the 
monsters of the Paleosaurian age, and gives to the 



SAA^ JUAN CAPISTRAA-Q. 85 

world the plaster-casts of creatures beyond reason or 
belief by the citizens of a later time. There may 
have been, and doubtless were, features of mission 
life incredible in these times, and the process of dis- 
covering them is similar to that of the anatomists. But 
they are human traits, and in trying to recall them, it 
is necessary to remember that men are governed 
almost entirely by the times in which they live. Here 
was practical socialism without a theory. Here was 
the Church without a doubt. Both things are now 
impossible, and these ruins are mementos of a time 
when they were possible. The church of the Fran- 
ciscans in California w^as a direct importation, in an 
age of profound belief, of the church of Spain. The 
church in Spain is the same as that of other Catholic 
countries, and yet it is not. To this day there is a 
difference below the surface. Perhaps the undefined 
thing which we can not understand about these mis- 
sions is the secret of their great success, combined 
with that of their total failure. As one wanders 
about the ruins he is continually turning this ques- 
tion over. But the answer does not come unless it 
be in the form of a theory that the time permitted 
them, and that such time has passed. For the machin- 
ery was not different from that used everywhere by the 
same sect for the same purposes. Some of it is here 
still. The little chapel that was a granary, whose 
sagging roof is propped with a post, is full of it, all 
dating back to the old times. The pictures on the 
walls are dim and blurred with time. The linen which 
serves as a base for embroideries seems to have come, 
and very likely did come, among the ecclesiastical 



86 SAN JUA N CA PIS TRA NO. 

stores provided by Galvez, a hundred and twenty- 
five years ago. In a little mouldy room at one side 
are some wooden statues about half life-size. They 
are sometimes headless and often want fingers, but 
are fine specimens of an art which is now, in its per- 
fection, among the lost ones. The wood of the faces 
and hands is covered with a composition that has 
retained its finish and color through all the years, 
and the eyes are of glass, and as perfectly made and 
preserved as those are which are now used in the 
arts which require them. 

Another small closet contains some curious eccle- 
siastical machinery. There is a board with a hold 
at one end shaped like the handle of a saw. The 
sides of it are studded lengthwise with iron grips 
precisely like those our forefathers used for the end- 
handles of the hair trunks of their days. Take this 
machine up and twist it vigorously from side to side, 
and you will be startled at its capacity for that kind 
of noise which is known in the vernacular as a racket. 
Another ingenious contrivance for the same general 
purpose is a three-cornered box, studded with swing- 
ing irons like the other, but inside of which there 
could also be rattled with telling effect a loose stone. 
These machines figured in the Good Friday proces- 
sions familiar to all who have lived in Mexico or 
Spain, and serve as an appeal to the sensibilities of 
the community at large. 

An ingenious contrivance is a wheel whose rim is 
studded with little bells. Turn it once over by the 
crank, and each bell falls over once and rings the 
particular key it happens to possess. This stands 



SA.V JUAN CAPISTRANO. 



87 



behind the altar and marks a particular moment in 
the ritual. 

And without these things this sanctuary would be 
poor indeed. Roof, walls, rafters, pictures, bells, 
images, are all of the olden time. There is nothing 
new. The mighty Church whose property it is rises 
to success and wealth, or descends to poverty and 
isolation, with an evenness of demeanor and a stead- 
fastness of purpose which commands the respect of 
the wide world. The machinery of her elaborate 




THE CORRmORS. 

ceremonial may be dispensed 
with. Her missionaries have 

threaded first the intricacies of every wilderness soli- 
tude the continent knows, and where mass has once 
been said in a hut or tent, or beneath a spreading tree, 
the cathedral has afterwards arisen with unfailing 
certainty. Only here has the process been reversed. 
The cathedral has fallen, but the priest and the ritual 
survive. I do not know if he believes its towers will 
ever rise again. Perhaps he never questions, but to 
his mind must often occur the singularity of a situa- 
tion perhaps quite without a parallel over so wide a 
country. All the surroundings, the whole country, 
is historic from the efforts of his brethren of a 



8S SAN JUA N CA PIS TRA NO. 

common faith, and in the midst of unexampled prog- 
ress in every field but the religious one, he remains 
as a kind of memento of all that was, and remains 
alone. I do not know his name ; I never saw him ; 
but in all my recollections of the sunny ruin by the 
sea, I find ihe humble and unknown man the most 
prominent figure. 

The visitor to Capistrano will observe a curious 
architectural discrepancy. A portion, almost one- 
half, of the ruined church is not of stone, but of 
adobe. In other words, it has twice fallen and been 
once rebuilt. An earthquake in i8i2*was a very 
different thing from what the same event would be 
in 1889, hence it has but the semblance of a tradition. 
It i.' not even known whether the rebuilding with 
adobe was ever entirely completed, and the observer 
would say that it probably was not. For on the gray 
stone walls, still erect and uncracked, the rampant 
winter vegetation of tropical California has gained 
a rooting, and will throw down stone after stone. 
Where the adobe in its turn has melted down, there 
are vast ridge 1 and mounds, covered shoulder-high 
with a miscellaneous growth of weeds. There is a 
plant with clustering yellow blossoms whose roots 
would wedge apart a Roman battlement, which inserts 
itself in every crevice, and flaunts there above statue- 
niche and grave, and flourishes upon air. Study- 
ing such ruins, one can but think of the immense 
advantage accruing from the absence of frost. It is 



* The earthquake which destroj-ed this most beautiful of the mission 
churches, occurred during early mass on December 8th, 1812. Some thirty 
people were killed, and many others wounded more or less seriously. 



SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. 89 

certain that but for this fortunate thing there would 
now be no missions at all ; nothing but mounds of 
adobe and heaps of stone. They are not solid walls. 
Faced on each side, almost anything was thrown 
between. Therefore the earthquake wrought havoc, 
and remedying the misfortune as best they might, 
the Padres committed the monstrosity of repairing 
masonry with the sun-dried bricks which latterly con- 
stituted one-half of the side walls, and the whole of 
the tower-end, of what had once been a most hand- 
somely-proportioned and elaborately-finished relig- 
ious structure.* 

The quaintness, to American eyes, of what re- 
mains can not well be put into words. We never 
made anything like it, and never shall. For with all 
our former flimsiness and present solidity; with all 
the money we have wasted or spent on Egyptian 
portals or Corinthian stucco; we have never, in a 
single instance, come as nearly as these missionary 
monks did to the filling of one great desideratum; 
the suiting of a building to the surrounding land- 
scape. It is an indefinable thing which can not be 
fixed by rules, and one does not know wherein pre- 
cisely the appropriateness consists. But it is present 
and apparent even in ruin and decay. Take the sun- 
shine, the gray-white sky, the yellow atmosphere and 
the rolling brown or green hills backed by higher 
ranges that are purple always, and imagine there a pile 
of American church architecture. The one may fit a 

* The Church was built almost precisely like that of San Francisco Antiqua, 
in Guatemala, also an earthquake ruin, though not so large. A series of low 
domes composed the roof, one of which yet remains over the chancel. 



90 SA.V JUAN CAPISTRANO. 

town — some towns — the other fits eternally its place 
among the fastnesses of a wilderness that can never be 
really changed by any effort of civilization. Some, 
the majority perhaps, may wish to see relics and hunt 
decay. But when you are gone again, if you have 
seen the country aright, your mental picture will be 
completest when you remember Capistrano sitting 
upon its knoll and looking down the glen to its speck 
of sky-blue sea, or San Diego at the valley edge 
asleep upon the shoulder of a hill, or San Luis Rey 
in its basin of sierras, trailing a green-and-yellow 
ribbon at its feet, or Gabriel amid its vineyards, 
drowsy with the fumes of wine, and each one will 
seem a thing that is a part of its natural surroundings, 
placed there by an ineffable and superhuman taste, 
and made to fit, with a preciseness that time has only 
mellowed and blended, all its settings. 

This is for the present. It is all one can carry 
away. The cold tones of a photograph do but spoil 
the soul of the reality. Colors might answer, but 
the artist has not yet come. All the past is but a 
memory, and it is but memories that we purchase 
with a whole life's experiences. There is still want- 
ing something to complete the picture, and that some- 
thing is beyond attainment. It is described by the 
word Life. For these things are, so to speak, pre- 
eminently dead. Baalbeck is not more lifeless, or 
Tyre more perfectly a thing of the past. But, with 
them, so is also the country dead, while with these it 
has put on the newness of a life beyond the wildest 
dreams of any monk who ever dreamed. Set up again 
the walls, and rebuild the towers, and ring the bells. 



SA .V J UA N CA PIS TEA NO. 9 1 

Cover the hills with herds and the valleys with vines. 
Recall the hosts of Indians and banish the American. 
Let the English tongue be again unheard, and put 
the railway so far away that even the village of Chi- 
cago, floundering in its swamp around a trading-post 
and a fort, knows it not. Let the storm-worn ships 
from around the Horn prowl along the coast for their 
cargoes of hides, the only and the infrequent visitors 
from the intangible and unimportant world. Bring 
again Spain, and make San Bias an important port and 
Guadalaxara a capital. Take away Los Angeles, and 
give the little white-washed adobe pueblo in the val- 
ley her full name and her proper people. Let only 
monks in robes and sandals, and soldiers in leathern 
jackets, and Indians bearing burdens, traverse the 
paths from mission to mission. Let us speak only of 
Yerba Buena if we mean the locality of the Pacific 
capital, and mention only San Carlos if we mean 
Monterey. Let a brown-walled rancho appear occa- 
sionally in the landscape, and let us make it the com- 
plete establishment of a feudalism almost unknown to 
the middle ages, perfect in independence, isolation 
and peace, the home of a life neither California nor 
elsewhere can ever know again. 

And let us put in its last and important place the 
last essential thing; the confidence and self-satisfac- 
tion of provincialism, the iinapprehensiveness of which 
ignorance is the sturdy mother. Let us desire no 
change and dream of none, and live in confidence and 
peace, protected by the Virgin and the saints, and for- 
get that this is America at all. Then shall we have 
something like a memory of the California missions. 



g 2 SA .V JUA ISF CA PIS TRA NO. 

not in decay and ruin, but in the days of their fru- 
ition and prosperity. This is the real past of which 
they are the mementos. 

Is it worth recalling? This truly American query 
will be the first in the minds of the majority of those 
who will read these words. There is a sense in which 
it is most assuredly not, and another in which a vague 
and undefined regret must surely follow any compari- 
son of it with the California of today. Arcadia was 
never a reality, yet in some of its forms it has bur- 
dened the poetry of every people, and been dreamed 
of and imagined since the infancy of the human race. 
And of this idealism humanity has never grown 
weary. There are few things worth striving for, but 
one of them is peace. In the tiredness of a ceaseless 
struggle, there are few to whom has not come, or first 
or last, a fearful pleasure in the thought of that sleep 
which knows no human reveille, which lets the aeons 
pass, which lies forever in the deep oblivion of dust. 
The peace which to some degree may come in life was 
never in this world nearer its idealization than at San 
Juan Capistrano three-fourths of a century ago. It 
can not be put into words, or painted, or sent by mail, 
but something of it broods there still. Men can not 
make it, or entirely destroy it. It is in the air, and to 
supplement it and add to it, is the feeling that the 
past has not yet quite gone away. The dust lies thick 
in the village street, and in it one almost looks to find 
the print of sandals. Below the brow of a little hill a 
stream of water purls across the road, and there is a 
roadside hedge composed entirely of the odorous 
California wild rose. In the shade of a walnut tree in 



SAJV JUAN' CAPISTRANO. 93 

the field close by, there is a glint of rural calico, and 
a group of women are washing garments upon a flat 
stone beside the stream, as their grandmothers did in 
the same spot while the American revolution was in 
progress. A rambling and roofless adobe is upon one 
side of the road, its brown walls defying time in away 
that is the usual puzzle to all who believe in the 
natural course of things. It has a little known history, 
wherein it differs from its neighbors that are much 
older, and were occupied as appurtenances of the mis- 
sion establishment. It was built by a man who came 
near embodying in California the traits of a race of 
Caballeros, who was almost the lastcf the long-sword 
gentlemen and fighters, and it cos: him thirty-five 
thousand dollars. He was of the same class and 
time of the man immortalized by Fremont in his 
story of the terrible little struggle known as the affair 
at San Pascual, and within these walls were nursed, 
by a woman, the wounded of that day. Among them 
was one American soldier, whose name and whose 
grave are now alike unknown. It is but another 
instance where '' the northern eagle shining on his 
belt" did not make any difference, and where Ximena 
appears again from among the people whom we 
habitually designate as '^Greasers." 

At all events the ruins are there, telling the same 
story a broken monument does, and the hills, 
and the sea, and the sunshine. They rule. As to 
Irving and his reader the Moor and not the Spaniard 
still inhabits the Alhambra, so to every visitor does 
the robed and sandaled Franciscan still abide at San 
Juan. The church has been once sold at auction, 



94 SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. 

has been used as a residence, has been besieged, and 
has still clinging to its decay the monastic odor, the 
sense of belonging to God. Defying time a faint blue 
fresco still clings to its inner walls, and even the 
names scratched upon it by fame-seeking wanderers 
does not make it less a place whence the odor of 
incense has scarcely yet departed. The railway 
threads the valley, and one wishes it was not there, 
yet it does not so much affect the mission as it visibly 
does the old stage-yard down the street where, since 
early in the fifties, the reeking horses drank at the 
log trough under the huge pepper-tree, and whence 
the rocking vehicle, with infinite bustle and impor- 
tance, carried its cramped passengers away again on 
a winding road between the endless hills. 

Far up the little valle}^ there is a still older mis- 
sion; the first San Juan, standing beside the trail of 
the Padres when they went northward in search of 
Monterey. Near where a trail used by them of neces- 
sity, and many a time since, comes down out of the 
hills into the valley, there is a sycamore whose like 
will not be found in half a continent. Its shade at 
noon will cover 120 feet. It was as big, perhaps, a 
hundred years ago as it is now, and no band of 
weary footmen ever passed it by. It recalls the 
vicissitudes of those early wanderings, and the soli- 
tude and silence that then shut in the Cross. The 
little valley is as silent now as then, and all 
unchanged by the hand of man. Only the sleek 
California cattle come and lie in the shade, careless 
of all the past and all that is to come. 



SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. 95 

But even as I write I see before me the contrast 
and antithesis of all humility or toil or sacrifice for 
crown or cross. I have heard in all the watches of 
the night a certain Voice, calling in utter wantonness 
the passing of the hours, and, if for prayer, utterly 
failing of so pious a purpose. Its owner now lies 
prone in the morning sunshine, his gorgeous tail 
trailed out behind him, and his bronze breast in the 
yellow dust from which it will arise as unsullied as 
his notorious vanity is unruffled. It is a being whom 
my reminiscences will ever designate as the Sultan 
of San Juan, and he is one of the striking trivialities 
of a place so full of opposite associations. For him 
there are no reminiscences, unless his gorgeous ego- 
tism should congratulate itself upon a clime as win- 
terless as that of his native land, and should imagine 
it to have been made for him alone. And this he 
doubtless does, for even now he rises and utters that 
strident cry which I trust may yet bring his neck to 
the block, and walks with mincing steps away among 
his hens, and does it all with the insensate grandeur 
that not even humanity may share with him. O, 
land of contrasts ! San Gabriel and Los Angeles; the 
crumbling mission of San Juan and the obtrusive 
personality of a peacock. 



Even so lately as a quarter of a century ago, there were at Capistrano 
extensive remains not now visible or known of. The present village is 
honeycombed with covered masonry aqueducts. Flumes were built across 
ravines on brick piers, after an ancient and substantial style now unknown. 
These became quarries for the moderns. 

There were also a large number of books, most of which have disap- 
peared. The church was rich in gold and silver vessels and ornaments, which 
were among the first articles to be found wanting. 

The Franciscans, here and elsewhere, took, when they went, everything 
portable that was theirs, or that could be turned into money, without robbing 



96 



SA N JUAN CA PIS TRA XO. 



the parish of anything coming under that species of property. Their suc- 
cessors do not seem to have been, some of them, even so conscientious as this. 
The great vv-ealth and splendor of the old times have thus been turned into a 
tawdriness and squalor that is striking. 

There was also at Capistrano a quarter of a century ago four or five times 
the population of the present. It was the stronghold of old customs and old 
ideas ; one of the last in California. What has become of these no one pre- 
tends to state in detail. The American civilization has swept as with a 
besom. Only the strongest survive it. This passing away is one of the inter- 
esting California studies. 

The church was deprived temporarily of its character before it became a 
parish ruin. Bonsard, a pirate, with his crew once occupied it for three days, 
while priests and neophytes took refuge in the willows of Trabuco creek, and 
waited until bis debauch upon mission beef and wine was over. The same 
thing happened at Santa Barbara and Monterey. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 




DISTINCT class of odors, 
sensations and impressions 
hang about every Spanish-Amer- 
ican town. Whether in New 
Mexico or California, they are so much the same, so 
nearly alike, that they would be recognizable to a 
blind man who had once learned to distinguish them. 
Yet it is difficult to describe them with any hope of 
conveying a correct idea of what they are to him who 
covers all points with the undoubtedly true statement 
that a town is a collection of human habitations, and 
a city a bigger one, and there rests. 

One of the strongest individualities on earth is 
the Spanish. A man who never changes himself, he 

97 



9 8 THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

impresses himself upon all his surroundings if they are 
of his own beginning. It is not that he is strong, for 
he is entirely and invariably unable to resist, in this 
country, the ideas and encroachments of the Saxon. 
He avoids, when he possibly can, the pain attendant 
upon the parturition of a new idea. The things he 
knows he knows nationally, and his very individual- 
ity is a national one. It is thus that amid all the 
newness of American life he retains his adobe corner 
unimpaired, alone, apart, separate, individualized. It 
is so in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, in Las Vegas or El 
Paso, and so also in the obscure nook he still retains 
in the beautiful city which is, except in name, the very 
antipodeof everything Spanish; in Los Angeles itself. 
Perhaps it is in the mere brown fact of adobe 
alone, yet adobe is one of his few acquired ideas 
which has become second nature. But it necessitates 
the thick walls, the small windows, the low doors, the 
single stories, the long porches, the sunken floors, 
always and everywhere generally characteristic of 
Spanish-American occupation. The sturdy struc- 
tures stand almost forever, and when abandoned by 
intention, sink back to earth again only with the pas- 
sage of the centuries, and leave at last a long, low 
mound that will still proclaim a human use, still 
declare the nationality of him who made it regard- 
less of all points of the compass and the symmetry 
of squares, convenient to a goat-path in front and a 
corral behind, and who lived in it as one does whose 
life might have originated the idea that has made 
immortal the masterpiece of Payne. * 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 99 

Whoever would understand aught of those by-gone 
days which placed on this continent the quaintness 
of Spanish peasant life, must come quickly if he 
wishes to judge by that surest index, the homes of 
the people. For the day of adobe occupation has gone 
by. A rumbling tile factory and a yard of sun-dried 
bricks do not exist long side by side. The age 
of cut stone and the age of dried mud do not pull 
along together. The street that has a cable car-line 
is not now much traversed by strings of laden don- 
keys. Only here and there is there a corner left, and, 
as an intermediary, the slant-eyed celestial has largely 
possessed himself of that, and Hop Sing and Yung 
Lee have hung upon the ancient walls their various 
signs of lavatory industry. And this is the strangest 
thing of all ; a wonder conspicuously left out of all 
the prophecies ; that the inheritor of the hidalgo 
should be the peasant of Peking or Macao. And, 
after the Chinaman, they are laid waste by time, 
or tumbled by spadefuls into carts, and the Span- 
iard and his belongings have said adios forever. 
Nobody knows what he thinks about it, and no com- 
plaints have been recorded. The closest questioning 
will not elicit his opinion or air his grievance. The 
dignity of his famous race upholds him while all 
around him goes on the sequestration of his inherit- 
ance and the spoliation of his country. For so it 
must seem to him. The process he can neither pre- 
vent nor understand, is the contrivance of a people 
even to whose tongue he is a stranger, and to one of 
Spanish blood there can be nothing more foreign and 
incomprehensible than that American life to whose 
most natural processes he has become a victim. 



lOO THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

But while here and there an adobe yet stands 
back of the street front in Santa Barbara, or down 
by the old renovated and replastered sub-mission in 
Los Angeles, or in some obscure nook in a mountain 
valley where once was the outpost of a cattle-ranch, 
or roofless and tenantless in the shadow of a mission 
church, or as the home of contented poverty in the 
midst of a village garden, let us regard them as the 
indices of those days that were present only forty 
years ago, and which are now so far in a remote past 
that the amateur antiquarian has already begun to 
delve in them and misunderstand them. One of 
these brown or intensely whitewashed structures 
standing alone is an architectural widow whose lone- 
liness one must respect, but where two or three are 
gathered together the cluster at once begins to have 
a character. And., to begin with, sunshine and 
adobes go together. There must be lights and shad- 
ows, and open doors, and a continual going in and 
coming out. Such a house with the door closed 
seems blind, and deaf and dumb as well. It is a place 
which lacks all newness, and which has always that 
air of use and occupation which makes it human. 
Somebody is alwa-rs there, and always at leisure, and 
invariably producing the impression that time is not 
an object worthy of particular attention. Perhaps it 
is a store, and has ^' Tienda' somewhere displayed 
upon its frontage. But, if so, the proprietor is not 
engaged, and has no anxiety about customers and 
sales, and sits content upon a box and smokes cigar- 
ettes, and does not advertise. But if it be a dwell- 
ing, there is always a woman there with a shawl over 



THE PEOPLE OE THE ADOBE. lOI 

her head, and a black-eyed child clinging to her 
skirts. The chances are largel}' in favor of a half- 
dozen others. A childless adobe I have never seen. 

Here, and in New and Old Mexico as well, there 
is a sign of nationality which may almost be regarded 
as a talisman. It is a string of red peppers. Where, 
strung upon a thread it hangs not upon the outer 
wall, there is something unquestionably wrong with 
the interior. For pepper, and not garlic, is the sauce 
of life with the Spanish-American, and a more harm- 
less dissipation it would be hard to find. '' Chile,'' or 
'"chile con came,'' comforts every simple life, and such 
lives are often drawn out to a good old age. 

Save where some American has adopted the mate- 
rial and fashioned himself therefrom a house, I do 
not remember ever to have seen a new adobe. Per- 
haps the Spaniard is, in his turn, of the opinion that 
he never saw an old American house, but, at least, 
that air of age and use he carries with him wherever 
he goes is inexplicable and indescribable. All his 
domestic belongings partake of it. His fence is old. 
The path beside his door is worn, and the step of his 
threshold seems to have been trodden by the feet 
of generations. The street in front of him may be 
clean, but it has the indescribable semblance of bear- 
ing the debris of centuries. And there is a sensation 
that does not arise to the decided character of an 
aroma, which nevertheless belongs in that list. It 
may be of the fuel he burns, mesquite or cedar, or 
a mingling of his cookery with the atmosphere, or 
his national smell. The Indian has it, but his is 
distinct and of a flavor anciently oleaginous. The 



I02 THE PEOPLE OE THE ADOBE. 

emigrant-car possesses it, and it stays after the occu- 
pants have raised the first fruits off of preempted land, 
and therewith purchased tickets for the remainder of 
their families to come over with. Every occupation 
has it as a trade-mark, and every nationality carries 
it as an unconscious inheritance. It has naught to 
do with cleanliness necessarily, and the American 
nose may with impunity only refer to it as one of the 
sensations of the Spanish occupancy, dim and faint, 
but there. 

The cot and the palace of old California were alike 
of sun-dried bricks, and from them come indiffer- 
ently the vaquero and the millionaire. San Francisco 
started so, and Los Angeles still shows some of her 
beginnings, and old San Diego is little else. Some- 
times the huge brown building rambled over an acre 
of ground, and was the clustering place of a host of 
dependents or the headquarters of a provincial com- 
munity. American statesmanship has been notori- 
ously nurtured in log houses, and all that was good 
or strong in California came out of these thick, 
brown walls. And there was such strength, mingled 
perhaps with a goodness which Americans do not 
appreciate, and which has long passed from human 
judgment and criticism. They were practically an 
unarmed and pastoral people, taken by surprise in an 
outlying province, and unsupported by a near or 
respectable government. Nobody cares now, not 
even the Spaniards, how California was won, and all 
the little battle-fields have perhaps been planted in 
oranges or their localities lost. They could not read 
fate, and there was nothing else to read. They did 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 



103 



not know of the enormous odds against them, or 
understand that conspiracy of the centuries against 
all things Spanish. They were not even that organ- 
ized militia which is the ineffective show of defense. 
There was no arsenal save the family powder-horn ; 
there were no arms but antiquated fowling pieces 




THE OLD GATE OF THE GARDEN. 

and disabled blunderbusses. No Californian could 
walk, or would, and they displayed only a force of 
free riders, armed with the riata, or the home-made 
lance. Yet they did fight. Nineteen men at San 
Pascual out of twenty-three were killed with thrusts. 
I know where there is a rust-eaten marine cutlas 



I04 THE PEOPLE Of THE ADOBE. 

which was picked up from where it had lain for a 
quarter of a century or more on the hills east of San 
Pedro. Some wandering bull has set his hoof upon 
the grip and broken it, and the dew has eaten deep 
scars into the blade. The national honor does not 
require, I think, that it should be denied that this old 
knife is the memento of a retreat which, though, of 
no great moment considering the final result, at 
least actually occurred. The men of the adobe, like 
those of the cabin and the clearing, have invariably 
been dangerous when aroused. In this case the won- 
der is that they awoke at all, for, hating Americans 
as they might, and as they are reputed still to do, 
they could have no devoted love for Mexico. A 
political and ecclesiastical orphan such as California 
was must make her own way. 

As a specimen of the abnormal development of 
some of these children of the adobe, did the reader 
ever hear of one Flores? It is not a pleasant or poet- 
ical reminiscence, for Flores merely showed one of 
the most ancient forms of Spanish wickedness. He 
was a bandit, and terrorized a goodly portion of South 
California as late as 1858. It was from his followers 
that Capistrano once withstood a siege. Nobody 
knew when to look for him or w^here. Commanding 
admiration after the old fashion of all times and coun- 
tries, he had many friends, and it seems finally to 
have become a question of exterminating him or con- 
ceding the fact of his being the actual ruler of the 
country. 

Going from Los Angeles to San Juan, a friend 
called my attention to a clump of trees growing in a 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 105 

low place in a wide stretch of ranch-land. " There," 
he said, *'is the place where Flores ambushed and 
killed the Sheriff of Los Angeles count}^ and his 
whole posse save one man." 

I had not heard the story, nor would its details, or 
many glimpses of the life and adventures of the Cal- 
ifornia bandit, probably interest the reader. But we 
had gone but a few miles further when another feature 
of the mountain landscape attracted my companion's 
attention and produced the sequel. It was a coun- 
tryman of Flores'' and his vaqueros, and not the 
American civil authorities, who were alone useful in 
bringing the hero to his untimely end, and the man 
who did it was the principal figure, on the Californian 
side, of the battle of San Pascual; Don Andreas Pico. 

Perhaps there were never two men wno more per- 
fectly illustrated the inherited types of old Spain than 
the man Flores and his mortal foe and final extermina- 
tor, Pico, bearing in mind the somewhat vivid distinc- 
tion that the one was a professional murderer and the 
other a gentleman. The enmity was not an actual or 
personal one, but grew out of the two opposing views 
of citizenship and law, and outlawry and plunder. 
The old Californian was such a man as comes to the 
front in emergencies with that certain and untrained 
instinct of the soldier common to the caballero, and 
which enabled an adventurer to conquer Mexico 
and an unlettered goatherd to lay waste Peru. A 
vaquero by training and life, and nothing more, 
he was a cavalryman by instinct, who would have 
been better suited to more stirring times. The little 
California war was long since over and gone, its 



I06 THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

victims and its enmities alike buried and forgotten 
for more than ten years when the Floras era locally 
dawned. The cowboys of San Pascual were still 
alive, and so was their leader, and they turned their 
attention to this marauding countryman. 

Through the pass my friend pointed out to me 
they followed the gang, all one day and all the fol- 
lowing night. The cowboys knew the mountains 
better than the pursued, and smiled among themselves 
in knowing how much further the robbers could go, 
and no further, on the trail they had taken. And 
when the barranca came, and there was neither cross- 
ing nor retreat, they took them all except Flores and 
one or two others. 

Pico w^as a churchman. He believed in all the 
dicta, and wished his fellow-sinners to have all the 
priestly consolation necessary to secure a favorable 
verdict when they were beyond his jurisdiction. So 
he placed them under guard while he went in further 
pursuit, intending to take them to Los Angeles and 
bespeak the services of a priest, ere he should hang 
them. But when he returned he found that some of 
them had escaped, and therefore he forget about the 
priest and the hereafter, and strung all the remainder, 
a riata to each, upon the nearest sizeable tree, and 
he and his vaqueros rode home again righteously 
content. 

A compatriot and neighbor of Pico's has been 
referred to in another chapter, who was also a char- 
acteristic product of the adobe community. He 
talked. He could neither read nor write, but had he 
possessed these accomplishments he would have used 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 



07 



innumerable reams of paper, and assisted greatly in 
that official pen-and-ink garrulity for which his race 
is famous. His friends would have done the fighting 
and he would have made the treaties, and probably 
making this mutual imaginary concession, they got 
on very well in the same region in hum-drum daily 
life. This last was also a caballero, perhaps an uncon- 
scious one, and born a v/hole age too late. Hav- 
ing no education to begin with he proceeded to 
acquire one, and took an early opportunity of hiring 
a talented wanderer through the country to teach 
him to form his distinguished autograph, with a 
riibrica. Thereafter the signing of his name was an 
important ceremony. He would say " listed qiiiere 
)ni Jir?na ? " and when books and all other impedimenta 
had been duly carried away and the document spread 
before him, he would look upon it with a Quixotic 
frown, insert his goose-quill in the fatal fluid, and go 
through the whole of the " education " upon which he 
prided himself, with three quiddles, a long under- 
stroke and two dots, and the fateful deed was done. 
It was entirely a mechanical accomplishment, for 
which he had paid the man who taught it to him a 
hundred heifer calves. This unimportant incident in 
a provincial life may perhaps hardly amuse the reader 
who has little idea of the Spanish character, or who 
has read Cervantes but for the story of the infatuated 
Knight of La Mancha. 

The original cowboy is a Californian and a nurse- 
ling of the adobe, and all his imitations are compar- 
atively feeble. And that also is in the race. The 
word caballero means nothing more than one who 



io8 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 



rides, but it has meant "gentleman" for six hundred 
years. Here is one who, without much use of hyper- 
bole, may be said to have been born on horseback, 
and to have cantered as his last act. His style of 
horsemanship. is one born of necessity and long habit, 
and is totally distinct from that of the schools. But 
all the real hard riding of America is done after his 
unconscious fashion ; a fashion acquired only in 




MISSION BUILT OF ADOBE. 

youth, and impossible in 
ordinary life. One may see 
him even in these degenerate days, wherever there 
are cattle on the hills, or a rambling ranch-house lin- 
gers superfluous in the land of booms. Wherever he 
is, he will not walk, and even his going to bed is but 
an unnatural waddle. Every day, all day, summer 
and winter, he is but a part of a horse. And yet he 
is not an imposing centaur. He will '^ stay " for end- 
less miles; he is tireless in a proverbially hard life; 
but either his "technique" is bad or the rules are 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. IO9 

wrong. He sways in the saddle; his reins are often 
held in the wrong hand; his stirrup-straps are too 
long; he mounts quickly but awkwardly; he uses his 
heels; he " flaps " his elbows; when really on business 
he raises his bridle-hand as high as his chin, and leans 
forward, and perhaps does everything he should not 
do. But he would ride an English hunting-field to 
death, and, give him horses enough, would be the 
finest light cavalryman the world ever saw. 

And even now he is perpetually armed — not with 
anything the reader thinks of as a weapon, but with 
the riata. This lissome coil of plaited rawhide, or of 
twisted black and white horse-hair, hangs always at 
his saddle-bow. The implement seems never to have 
been Spanish, and was not imported. It is compara- 
tively modern, for it would be almost useless without 
a horse, and there was a time in America when horses 
were not. The Indians did not have it, so far as 
mentioned by any investigator, and it is altogether 
sui generis, a cowboy's, a vaquero's, thing. 

It sometimes misses fire, so to speak, of course. 
So does everything else. But it is sure enough and 
strong enough to catch and control the oldest bull or 
the newest calf of the herd, and to outwit and tangle 
any creature over whom its loop may fall. It has an 
effective range of thirty to sixty feet, and the throw- 
ing of it is simply a "knack," obtained by practice 
and from natural aptitude, but one in which all mem- 
bers of the clan of vaqueros are more or less efficient. 
Swung in wide circles obliquely round the head, 
when let go it passes through the air with a singing 
sound not pleasant overhead to the creature at whom 



I lO THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

it is cast, and there seems to be little use in attempt- 
ing to *' dodge '^ the flying loop. Were I to attempt 
the entertainment of the reader by stories of its 
efficiency, well authenticated, they would simply be 
relegated to the extensive limbo of Western " yarns." 
But its use is now universal over the whole unfenced 
Southwest. It, and not the fateful tool of Colonel 
Colt, or of Colonel Bowie, is the chiefest implement 
of that intermediate civilization which maybe worse 
than none, but which is the ordained predecessor of 
the school-house and the plow. Sometimes it 
remains even a little later. Major Ringgold, in com- 
mand of his battery, was dragged from his horse 
with a Mexican riata and killed, in the heat of battle. 
The last lynching but one in eastern Kansas was 
practically done by a mob of one mounted man, who 
flung his coil over the criminal's head, and executed 
him by riding off with him. The progress of fires in 
Western villages has been repeatedly arrested by 
"roping" the projecting timbers of half-burned 
structures by a skillful cast, and pulling them down. 
When a wild steer runs a muck through the streets of 
Chicago, as has not infrequently occurred, the fusil- 
lade of the police has little effect, and the man longed 
for is he who regards the whole occurrence as quite 
a natural one — for a Texas steer — and who cooly 
proceeds to " rope " him and induce him to return and 
be killed professionally, and for the general good. 

Of near kinship with the riata is another; that 
peculiar piece of equestrian architecture known these 
forty years as the " California Saddle." For it is to 
the pommel of this that the subtle line is attached. 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. \ \ I 

and it must be strong. In comparison with this 
structure, with what contempt must the flat English 
riding-pad be regarded ; " fit for a pacin' hoss and 
an old man," one of my Texan friends once told me. 
Take a frame whose elaborate '' lines " are compar- 
able only with those spoken of in naval architecture; 
brace the arches with riveted iron ; plate and 
strengthen it wherever possible ; cover this frame 
with thong-sewed raw-hide, fitting without a crease, 
and let it dry and shrink there ; then cover again 
more or less with carved and embossed leather; rim 
the round " horn,'^ as big as a tea-plate, with silver, 
and fringe and tassel and plate it wherever possible; 
hang the huge wooden stirrups with their hoods and 
shields; furnish it with a woven hair " cinch " that 
will stand any strain ; be sure that not a buckle occurs 
anywhere in its organization; and you have some of the 
chiefest features of the saddle that has gone from the 
Californian vaqiiero over half a continent. When the 
broncho has it on he feels that it is there to stay, and 
since he may lie down and roll in it only to his own 
disappointment, he has for generations ceased to do 
so. It is open in the middle from end to end, and 
his high backbone, the contradictory thing about a 
broncho which makes one think he was not built to be 
ridden when he is not good for anything else, is never 
galled. It is as hard as wood in the seat, and it is 
the rider's person that must be cushioned and not 
the saddle. The blacksmith will hold -and hammer 
an iron bar which you would drop. The cook in 
your kitchen dabbles with impunity in the same 
water with which she removes the hair from the back 



I r 2 THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

of your neighbor's pointer when he becomes too fre- 
quent in her domain. The Mexican peasant, reared 
amid a thousand varieties of cacti, has the foot of a 
pachyderm and a hand that plucks the red tuna with 
its million microscopic barbs. So in the vaquero and 
the cowboy, and mayhap the hardened cavalryman, 
the callouses of kindly nature are interspersed as are 
those of the palm of your hand. 

South California in a state of nature is a land of 
nooks and corners, infinitely more beautiful then than 
any improvement has made them since. In these 
nooks the original Spaniard seems very generally to 
have nestled. When he did each one was an unin- 
tended corner of Arcadia with an adobe house in the 
middle. To say it is the land of flowers is but to 
repeat an item from an immense literature purely 
American in its origin, and devoted to a delineation 
of the attractions of described tracts of it. But it 
truly is, and of all lovers of flowers perhaps the Span- 
ish peasant woman is the most devoted. Visit her at 
this late time in her California career, in her little 
brown house, with its little brown garden studded 
with bloom, and when you go away she will give you 
a flower. To her it has a certain value you may not 
perceive, and it is a gift — a "friendship's offering" 
the significance of which these heartless times have 
almost obliterated. There is only one variety of 
native dwelling in all this country that has not its 
bloom, and that is that most desolate and womanless 
of human abiding-places, a sheep-herder's shelter. 

I know a gentleman who, besides the designation 
already given him, is an Irishman, a soldier and a 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. \ 13 

bachelor, who was with me once in the yard lying 
about a little village adobe, as usual a place of flow- 
ers. When we were going away, and had reached the 
rickety little whitewashed gate, a child came and gave 
us each a bunch of flowers. " Now you see," said he, 
explanatorily, '* these people love such things. That 
poor woman would carry water a mile in an olla to 
make them grow." Thereupon he went back and told 
her how to cure the sickness of her big grapevine, and 
how pi-etty the flowers were, and I, a clumsy stranger, 
knew nothing better than to explore the depths for 
convenient small coinage for the child, after the usual 
American fashion. 

They tell us unanimously, and alas ! history bears 
them out, that the Spaniard is cold, cruel, revenge- 
ful. For my small part I may only answ^er that his 
womankind have borne and trained him as ours have us, 
and that not in all rural California, or in rural Mexico 
either, will one find, even to the washerwoman at the 
brink of the acequia, aught but ladyship and gentle 
courtesy. It is not merely training, and there is a 
dignity of race for which neither the Spaniard nor his 
peasant mother will ever be equaled. The races do 
not quite make each other out. Ours is dominant, 
but the Chinaman may overreach us in the end. The 
adobe people have seen the end, and their poor con- 
tentment in what was theirs is gone. Yet the courtesy 
and simplicity remain, and from it, if from nothing 
greater, might we. obtain some idea of social life in 
the California of the old times. 

It was pastoral and almost patriarchal to a degree 
never attained elsewhere in America, and never to be 



I 14 TEE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

seen again. A ranchero thinks he works hard, and 
regards himself as one of the toilers of the earth. 
He was under that impression in the old times, but it 
is only a shepherd's idea. For his day included rest, 
laughter, perhaps the dance. There was no winter, 
and there was not in any land where a national mer- 
riment, a race festiveness, ever existed as an unarti- 
ficial thing. If I made a comprehensive map of the 
United States, I should mark off this remote corner 
with a red circle, as being the only spot on the conti- 
nent where, even under peculiar conditions, the peo- 
ple had ever danced in the afternoon, or it had never 
at some time snowed in the old-fashioned way. 

All that we now see was absent. There was not 
a fence, other than that which enclosed a garden or 
a corral, in all the land. Very small area was occu- 
pied, and, save the nooks and shady corners men- 
tioned the country was a green or a yellow wilderness, 
asleep in the sunshine. To journey was to ride, 
not upon roads, but paths; not in wheeled carriages, 
but on horseback. There were no mails, and a horse- 
man carried tidings from rancho to rancho, or they 
who came and went were the chroniclers of the 
times. The book, as we know it, the serial publica- 
tion, printing itself, were all unknown. No diarist 
or scribbler, no childish private impressionist, ever 
passed that way, and the present writer is sorry they 
never did. All these things were as unthought-of as 
they were in Mesopotamia, and would have been as 
useless, and this while in Europe the day of the 
pamphleteer was at its prime, and Franklin, on this 
same continent was making Poor Richard's Alma- 
nack, and Mother Spain was stirred by heretical 



THE PEOPLE OE THE ADOBE. 



115 



opinions, and the triumphant day of the daily news- 
paper had dawned in sister colonies that were not so 
rich or old as this. There were no schools. The 
wealthy ranchroan hired a person who could read 
and write to teach his sons, and the daughters came 
by embroidery how they might, and by dancing tra- 
ditionally, and these were all they should know. 
There were no doctors, and women, after the fashion 




OLD ADOBE WALLS. 

of knightly times that seem to us very old indeed, 
were chirurgeons — the setters of broken bones, the 
healers of contusions, the staunchers of blood. 
Women doctors are a very old institution, and they 
practised in California while the question as to 
whether they could or should be doctors was being 
first discussed from the allopathic view-point. So far 
as knowm even the Spanish lawyer, the toughest of 
his clan, had not made his appearance amid this 
innocence. The Alcade may sometimes have been a 



I I 6 THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

licenciado, or he may have had upon his sign the word 
"Abogado/' There are reasons purely circumstan- 
tial, and growing out of real estate transactions, 
which render this conclusion tenable. 

As all these prominent things were absent in the 
Californian Arcadia, so were others which were not so 
necessary. There were, of course, no fashions, and 
here would have been the place to find truly, at a 
date about the same as that of the battle of New 
Orleans, how the dames of Southern Europe dressed 
themselves when New Orleans was founded. There 
was nothing of what we call trade; there was only 
iudustr3^ Every necessity of life was made where 
the raw material grew, as it had been fifty years 
before by our own great-grandparents, and as it still 
was to some extent. The rancho, to the Californian 
the capital of social life, contained everything, made 
everything. There was a chapel thepe, and some- 
times even a priest. There were tailors and shoe- 
makers and smiths. There was a mill and a tannery, 
and a cemetery often enough to supply every reason- 
able demand. The products were rude, but they 
served, and when anything was wanting they sup- 
plied it with rawhide, and if in haste, with the hair 
on and wet with the natural juices of the animal it 
had covered. This singular material found a place 
everywhere. Every coupling or cross-beam was 
bound with it, the handle of everything was tied on 
with it, the stock of every old blunderbuss in the 
province was wrapped with it. It never came loose. 
Old doors are swinging yet whose rawhide hinges 



THE PEOPLE OP THE ADOBE. \ I 7 

first began to bend half a century ago. Rawhide 
was to every Californian second nature. 

All human experience seems to indicate that the 
nearer a community comes to these simplicities the 
happier it is, and it is a fact that the manhood that 
has rocked the world has oftenest sprung from such 
surroundings. The most charming pictures of Saxon 
life are those of the gay green wood. Priestcraft 
chiefly rules in the crowded centers of civilization. 
The groves were God's first temples. Mountains have 
been the nursing mothers of both patriotism and 
poetry. The fatherland of these people is a mount- 
ain country, and whoever has overrun Spain has 
found that the entire population rose up behind him 
unconquered when he had passed. All that was here 
was natural to Spaniards, and they were not com- 
plaining. It would be yet. No railway would ever 
have been built, or mountain path made practicable 
for wheels, or uplands redeemed from the desert. 
For to this hour are those things true of the mother 
land, upon whose head lie the centuries. The old 
Californian, iarmer or friar, was a poetic anachronism, 
as are all Spaniards, charming, simple. Arcadian, but 
now out of place in the awful country where ten years 
make a century, and beside the terrible people who 
laugh at saints because they have never had any, and 
scoff at miracles because they perform them them- 
selves. 

The Spanish woman, wherever in all sunny lands 
her lord has borne her, has maintained, even more 
entirely than he, the peculiarities of her race, and 
these have been marked and striking for centuries. 



I I 8 THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. 

She is a follower of custom and a conservative for 
whom no equal is known ; a stickler for costombre del 
pais who knows no relenting; a believer in all that 
ever was, who knows no shadow of turning. She is 
a frivolous being who is yet solemn and penitent; a 
dancer of the zapatrro who is yet the best friend of 
the priest; a tinkler of guitars, who nevertheless goes 
to mass every day. It was this Spanish woman who 
kept away from old California all the features of our 
frontier, and who caused it to be from the beginning 
a custom-regulated and precedent-governed commu- 
nity. These features were absent here, and it is the 
only case on North American soil in which, under 
similar circumstances, they were. She reared her 
sons not as frontiersmen, but as Spaniards; and her 
daughters not as the awkward and unkempt slaves 
of circumstance and toil, but as the women of all 
their generations. It has been said that no differ- 
ence is to be noted between the women or the 
houses of Lima and those of Seville, and there are 
no later appearances to indicate that she of the Cal- ' 
ifornia valley was ever aught more or less than the 
woman she would have been on an olive-covered hill- 
side in old Spain. In utter isolation, with a thou- 
sand untrodden leagues intervening between her and 
all her sisters; w^ith nothing but unconscious custom 
and unlearned tradition to support her; the Spanish 
woman of California still wore the rebosa and the 
comb; still fancied the yellow silk and the falling 
lace; still had roses in her cheeks and her hair; still 
danced, sang, laughed, prayed, wept with an incon- 
sistency that made her consistent; still knew as 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ADOBE. I I 9 

much and as little; still clung to her idioms and her 
lisps, her traditional fears and constitutional procliv- 
ities; was still beautiful at sixteen, fat at thirty and 
lean and cronish at fifty. 

In all reminiscences of the times of the adobe, one 
does but go over and over again the characteristics 
of a wonderful race whose character is almost as 
changeless as that face that has looked across the 
Lybian sands for five thousand years. No man has 
suffered more vicissitudes than the Spaniard has; no 
man has had his national heart oftener broken; but, 
also, no man has so changelessly maintained himself 
amid varying and strange surroundings, and in the 
very midst and presence of his successors. The Mes- 
tizo, the mixed man, in New or old Mexico, or in 
California, takes to the Spanish side, and speaks the 
Spanish tongue, and believes in the Spanish faith. 
And this singular power of impressing himself, of 
leaving himself as a memento, exists in line with a 
list of failures such as are hardly to be set down to 
the credit of any other people. To all there is of 
him, practically, north of the isthmus of Darien, we 
may begin now to say a quavering adios hasta nunca. 
But of his isms and ideas and beliefs, of his wonder- 
ful personality, of his perfect tongue, we shall not be 
quit until a time so far in the future that we need 
not contemplate it. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW. 




THE FIRST SETTLER. 

OOMETHING has been said in a former chapter 
of the personality of the Franciscan brethren in 
connection with what they did or were apt to do, 
and they have been alluded to not only as examples 
of missionary zeal, fortitude and success, but as nota- 
bly correct in their judgment of the proper and neces- 
sary surroundings of such success. 

1 20 



THE OLD AND THE NE W. \ 2 I 

Without any study of the record or particular 
knowledge of the past of California, and seeing their 
country with themselves left out, the only glimpse 
one catches of the Padres now might fairly lead to 
almost opposite conclusions. For there is but one of 
the twenty-one missions they founded that is now 
their own, and that is no longer a mission, but a monas- 
tery. In the brightness of the sunshine, looking down 
on the bluenessof the sea, surrounded by a town that 
has had a "boom," amid the continual comings and 
goings of total strangers not alone to them, but to the 
community, confronted by change and newness and 
all things anti-monastic, worldly, beautiful, they live 
the secluded life, and observe the rules of St. Francis, 
and are apart in the ways not only of this life, but in 
the path to that life which is to come. 

Considering the church alone, the mission of Santa 
Barbara is perhaps the best-preserved of all the estab- 
lishments of the original Franciscans. Seven or eight 
of the brethren are gathered here, not as relics or 
remainders of the toilsome and eventful past, but sim- 
ply as friars of their order, pursuing their own way 
to the final exchange from brown to white, content 
and uncomplaining, let us suppose, with the tempo- 
ral fate that has befallen their order in these days, 
with no Indians to convert, no holy joy to experience 
in the acquisition of souls or lands, no difficulties to 
overcome but those that arise in the inner man, no 
sacrifices to make but those that lie within their 
vows. 

The inevitable first impression in visiting the 
place of these good men must be one produced by 



122 THE OLD AND THE NEW. 

the sense of contrast and incongruity. They perhaps 
do not know or care as much about the story of their 
great order in California as the visitor does. They 
were not left behind in the sorrowful exodus of the 
sequestration, and are as indifferent to the influences^ 
and meanings of the unparalleled conquest of their 
brethren as are the pages upon which these words are 
printed. Nor are they in the least affected by the 
fact that the results of that conquest have gone by 
with the fact, or that the end, from the view-point 
they must naturally assme, is more sorrowful than 
the beginning was discouraging. Mendicants by rule, 
as naturally insecure in their expectancies as a faith- 
hospital, they must here support themselves in a 
largely Protestant community, and must do it with- 
out any of the opportunities their brethren had, and 
even without those of other men. The vineyard and 
the tannery, the mill and the tallow-cauldron, are no 
longer theirs. Their strange idea of what a holy life 
consists in is essentially a mediaeval one, without 
sympathy in these times. They are no longer left 
even the boon of silence. Business, the prevailing 
idea of the century, surrounds them. They can not 
avoid it. The grocer's man brings them patent-roller 
flour in a rattling wagon, and comes away and bangs 
the ancient door behind him, and at the end of the 
month the bill doubtless reads like any other house- 
holder's; so much for so much. In the old days at 
San Diego they once so far lapsed as to sometimes 
ride in the huge and shrieking carts to and from the 
fields, and thereupon the carts were burned and the 
forgetful did penance. In Santa Barbara they ride 



THE OLD AXD THE NElV. 



12 



in the street cars. Thus has the genius of modern 
common sense conspired against a holiness that is of 
the past, and thus does evolution militate against 
rule, and this is the end, the sloping and attenuated 
end, of the days and accomplishments of the Fran- 
-.--®. ciscans of California. 

Perhaps they do not care, for 
in the nature of the case it 
would seem that a monk, at 
least one deprived of 
the stimulus of some 
expected result, would 
scarcely care for any- 
thing. They must 
suppose that some 
others must be sav- 
V 5 ed besides them- 
selves, else they 
could not be mis- 
sionaries, and if 
so, the iron rule of 
monasticism is not 
essential. But for 
all forgetfulness of 
men,and entire ob- 
literation of their 
own records, they 
have duly provided. All the generations of them who 
have lived at Santa Barbara sleep indiscriminately 
together, unmarked and unlamented, in a crypt 
beneath the church-floor. When it is full, if it should 
ever be, the bones that have lain longest are taken 




FRANCISCANS OF SANTA BARBARA 



124 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 



away, and room is made for the latest clay. There 
are no records of any deeds: a monk can do no deeds. 
Junipero Serra himself, and even St. Francis his great 
father, obtained their posthumous appreciation at the 
hands of the people of the world. Serra is not even 
conceded to have been other than all his brethren 
were. His name is not in the calendar. He was 
mourned when he died, and his grave has perhaps 
been discovered at Monterey, and some of the children 
of this world have done him due reverence, and that 
is all. 

These seven or eight Franciscans see every day, 
and possibly become accustomed to it, those things 
which cause the merest Protestant stranger to stop 
and think. The gray old building stands on a 
little knoll in the valley now covered at its sea- 
ward end by the town of Santa Barbara, and which 
extends with many a convolution back among the 
hills. The place is one of the most beautiful in 
the world, with a singular suggestion, but for the 
lack of snow-peaks, of a second Switzerland; — a 
tropical eidolon of what has been described in 
thousands of enthusiastic pages, and of what all 
the world has gone again and again to see. Just 
beyond the building, and unseen until one almost 
enters it, is a narrow valley full of trees, down 
which runs a stream. High up toward the source 
of this the Padres begun their first enterprise, and 
along the hill and down its slope lies the cement 
conduit which brought them water as cool and 
clear as a trout-stream. The reservoir in which 
they caught it is there still, as sound as when it 



THE OLD AND THE NEW. 125 

was made about 1786, and the iron pipe which now 
brings the water lies near the original one of the 
missionaries. 

In the side of the reservoir, which has a look 
of solidity not possessed by any modern structure, 
there was a sliding wooden gate. Only the square 
opening is there now, out of which the water poured 
to turn the mill-wheel; the building and sluice for 
which, but not the wheel, are there yet. Interest 
in these sound and lasting mementos of ecclesi- 
astical industry can hardly prevent reflection upon 
the economy and acuteness of the arrangement. 
This water was -wanted for irrigation and domestic 
uses, but it did not hurt it any to turn a wheel first. 
Therefore a ''turn " of water on the garden and fields 
made it also grinding day, saved the cost and labor 
of a dam, and the "going to mill " up the valley in an 
Indian country. 

Buildings, some of which are so sound that they 
could be used again, are strewn thickly about on 
this little point of land. They are of even more 
than the usual solidity of mission constructions, and 
were certainly built without any premonition of the 
end of their uses after so brief a period as about 
fifty years. For there was much to do at Santa Bar- 
bara. There are said to have been some thirteen 
tribes about there, all of differing dialects and tribal 
customs and notions, and each to the other as the 
Jews were to the Samaritans. They assumed each 
for himself the distinction of a separate people, and 
must have had at first but faint idea of the unity 
that is in the Gospel. There are no tribes now; not 



126 THE OLD AND THE NEW. 

the semblance or traditions or remains of a single 
one. The mission water-works, the mission mill, the 
cracked mission bells and this group of Padres, who 
have only their own salvation to look after, and who 
knew them not, have outlasted them all. 

Sometimes one sees in one of the characteristic 
publications of modern California a cut entitled 
"A Mission Garden," and thence one would infer that 
these bowers are common. There may be two or 
three, and one of them is here. Undoubtedly it is 
much abbreviated in modern times, being but a 
small square as compared with that at Capistrano or 
San Luis Rev, and of no importance save as com- 
pared with the beautiful wilderness which surrounded 
it when it was bigger. The wonder is that it is here 
at all. Tadmor is not, practically, more a ruin, or 
more forsaken, than three-fourths of the missions 
are. There is a sense in which all are so, for they 
are mementos of a past of only a hundred years ago, 
yet a past so unlike the now that the Athenian 
Acropolis is quite as recent. 

But this little mission garden, still blooming, has 
one peculiarity not common to gardens — a woman 
has never entered it, nor will she until still another 
past has gone upon the record, and the walls are like 
those of San Luis and Capistrano and Santa Ynez. 
The glimpse from the tower is the nearest approach, 
and that she may have and usually will not. For this 
monastic deprivation she has no satisfaction save that 
the opposite sex may not visit convents. Yet on this 
very day at Santa Barbara had she her feminine 
revenge. There must have been other visitors about 



THE OLD AND THE NEW. I 27 

the venerable premises, for in a very narrow place 
the friar who conducted us found one of those willow 
contrivances with wheels which is the property of the 
youngest member of every respectable family. He 
was forced to the unwonted task of trundling it out 
of the way, and as he did so she merely said, with a 
glance at the cowl and gown, but a face seraphic in 
its innocence, ''It's the last place in the world I'd 
expect to find a baby-carriage in! " 

He was an Irishman, and she his unknown coun- 
trywoman. If for a moment there came into his eye a 
twinkle of the days before he was a monk, it passed 
again, and an exchange of humanities was not con- 
tinued. I trust I may be pardoned for the opinion 
that, to a son of Erin, all a monk's deprivations may 
not consist in an observance of the vows of his order. 
He is not so unnatural in his robe and cowl and 
shaven crown as not to wish sometimes to reply to a 
civil remark. Grace was given him on this occasion, 
and if he wanted to say, "It's only just the wagon, 
mum," as I thought he would have done, I trust he 
has found comfort in his conscience. 

A pathetic mixture of the old and the new; of 
ancient quaintness with modern ideas, exists when- 
ever a mission has been repaired. For nobody now 
can imitate the indescribable style in which every- 
thing in the old days seems to have been done. This, 
which is so alluded to for want of any better term, is 
not describable in words. There is an Indianesque 
suggestion in the most elaborate and the most sub- 
stantial of it which declares it to be the European 
plan and direction, the intention of a taste that had 



128 



THE OLD AND THE NE \V. 



known the ideals of sacred architecture, and of the 
masonry that was old when Rome became the capital 
of Christianity, but built by the barbarian hand. Put 
back the fallen stones of this; repair it by modern 

means; and you have the 
most undesirable of 
combinations. At 
Santa Barbara a 
new reservoir 
stands beside the 
old and dry one 
of the Padres, 
practically in the 
same spot, and 
fed by the same 
source, and not 
greatly larger, 
j Close by the 
church are hand- 
some modern 
houses. There 
is a new ceiling, 
rather than which 
one would prefer 
to risk an occa- 
sional bit of fall- 
coNTEMPLATioN. -^^^ mortar. Yet 

they have left it alone wherever possible, and time 
may partially heal again the scars of incongruous 
repair. There is no high pulpit now, the timbers that 
held it having crumbled in dry decay. Not so as yet 
the very practical and artistic emblems of mortality 




THE OLD AND THE NEW, 



129 



that adorn the outer frame of the door that opens 
into a cemetery that has been delved over and over. 
These are human skulls, with crossed thigh-bones 
beneath them, inserted in the stucco so that they 
seem to have been carved there in high relief. If not 
artistic they are most effective, and have long grinned 
there upon the sadness that comes to all, and with 
more effective meaning than all the urns and texts 
and weeping angels that beautify decay in a less 
realistic age. 

Even the long tank upon whose sloping rim the 
Indians washed their clothes is there, and has been 
replastered too, and is full of water. The figure out 
of whose mouth the water pours looks precisely like 
the animal idea of the Pueblos, and is probably the 
savage notion of a bear, life-size. But no more 
Indians will ever come again to make lavish expendi- 
ture of the mission soap upon the sloping stucco, and 
it is but a monumental keepsake of the old times. 

What infinite pains must have been expended in 
their day upon the mission bells. I do not know 
where the oldest are, or the sweetest, but one of 
these square towers is full of them, and one with 
edges thin and jagged, says, in a circular inscription 

whereof the name is not remembered, " 

made me in 1876." Another has a text in characters 
so jagged, and with Vs for Us, that it would require 
an antiquarian to read it. Among the necessary 
things sent to California by the first ships that came 
were seven church bells. They were things indis- 
pensable. They carried some of them whenever they 
went to establish a new mission, and hung them to 



130 THE OLD AND THE NEW. 

the low branches of live-oaks and awoke the barbaric 
silences with their clangor.* 

Afterwards they came from time to time, until 
there were more than a hundred of them ringing at 
the various missions, always in groups, but without 
any regard to tune or tone. It was a long journey, 
and a slow one. Cadiz or Barcelona to Havana, 
Havana to Vera Cruz, Vera Cruz around the Horn 
to San Diego, and thence up the coast or across 
the country painfully. Doubtless the imperishable 
bronze of hundreds more of them rests in the ooze 
of the deep sea bottom, having gone down in the 
innumerable wrecks of those times. Yet Mexico is full 
of them, and the slow ox-teams of still slower times 
carried still more of them from Vera Cruz to Santa 
Fe, and to Taos and Tucson and El Paso, and all the 
villages of the Rio Grande. Even Texas had them, 
and they rang a repique^ a mistaken one, when the 
slaughter of the Alamo condemned their chimes to 
foreign ears over a region greater than all Europe, 
and forever. With the crudest skill they hung them 
where they are ringing yet, and their tones are those 
of a requiem wherever heard. 

As to these, there is no other reason why they 
should be heard. The worshipers are few or none, 
and the masses are said to walls, and the Stations of 
the Cross, and the echoing floors. No scene can 
more vividly recall the recollection of former days 
than the Sunday vespers, when there is not an Indian 

* There are California artists of no mean ability. Why does not some one 
of them turn his genius to " The Ringing of the Bells," and give the world 
an artist's vision of the sunny wilderness, the surprised barbarian and the 
heroic Padre of a hundred years ago? 



THE OLD ALD THE NEW. 131 

face where once were hundreds. All the church 
has now, after her great success, are in the cemetery 
asleep. Yet as changelessly imperturbable as the 
ages through which she has passed she goes right 
on. Time and the world, and death, and change, 
do not affect her, and she stands alone in her capacity 
for patient waiting till her time shall come again, 
and all. men shall be gathered unto her. Here at 
Santa Barbara, Virgin and Martyr, the blue clouds of 
incense have risen for more than a hundred years 
about her image. The hearts she was made to 
impress are dust. A town, an American city, has 
grown up around her shrine and bears her name. 
All things that were not intended have come, and all 
that were hoped for are gone. A handful of monks, 
strangers to her sponsors, and anachronisms, still 
hover about her and will sleep beneath her feet at 
last. They are mementos of a time so far upon the 
verge that not a thing on earth, and not a thought, 
is as it was when the little Italian town sent forth 
their founder and his followers. Yet those are not 
further off, nor more incongruous, than the more 
recent ones whose hopes and prayers w^ere centered 
here. One may perchance visit a ruin merely, and 
then forget it, but one does not forget the living 
reminders of a ruin that is not alone of chapels, or 
mission-lands, or sequestration, but of an era. 



CHAPTER Vlll. 

A CONNECTING LINK. 



a 



n^HERE are days when everything goes wrong." 
The beldame who made this remark to me, 
among a rambling assortment of others, gave me the 
impression of being what I have taken the liberty of 
calling her not so much from actual senility as from 
intention. But she was old enough to be at entire 
liberty to use any form of speech she chose to a 
stranger whom she had never before seen, and whom 
she must travel far to ever see again. I was at the 
moment inclined to her belief in the matter of com- 
mon philosophy she was an advocate of, for various 
petty reasons, one of which was that I was bored. 

For the sun shone with Californian fervor on the 
hills lying about San Diego, and upon them all there 
was not a tree w^here one could remove his relentless 
hat, and sit upon a dusty boulder, and gratify him- 
self with a demonstration of the axiom that in Cali- 
fornia the sun is always hot and the shade is always 
cool. The light brown dust, fine as wheaten flour, 
covered my shoes and seemed to have penetrated to 
the inside. It had not rained much ever, and here 
not at all since the end of the season locally known 
as Winter, and all the innumerable stones, and the 
gravelly concrete on which they rested — that decep- 
tive Macadam which needs only to be wet to become 
as fruitful as the Delta of the Nile — gave me the 

132 



A CONNECTING LINK. I 33 

impression of containing not a drop of moisture 
down to the center of the earth. The brown Hzards 
my footsteps startled glared at me with ridiculous 
malignity, with beady, lidless eyes, and glided away. 
The dusty green bushes caught at me as I passed; 
big enough to walk around, small enough to be abso- 
lutely shadowless. A lazy little tepid wind blew 
from the South, fanning nothing into coolness, and 
deceptive in intention. Below me lay the long, shin- 
ing scythe which I knew was the Bay, and beside 
it, thick and metropolitan in the center, and dwin- 
dling away into flecks and patches on the hillsides, lay 
the town. Beyond all was the shining silver endless- 
ness of the Pacific, asleep under a covering of haze, 
ending without horizon in a gray-blue sky. 

Why I had come there I do not precisely know. 
I was not looking for lot investment. It is a paor 
country that will not afford the privilege of a stroll 
without exacting a repentance. Others had been 
there before me, for long furrows had been ploughed 
on some of the slopes, and earth had been removed 
with a scraper, and posts and boards announced that 
this was Such-and-Such an Avenue. At other places 
stood the pine business cards of the firms who dealt 
in real estate, and at still others ''Snap Bargains" 
were announced. Before me, erected so that all 
might know, was an announcement in large letters 

that "This Tract, by feet, is reserved for 

the erection of the Finest Hotel in Southern Cali- 
fornia." So it was; there was no disputing it, and I 
passed on. 



134 A CONNECTING LINK. 

The antipode of all this I encountered in the old 
woman whom I have mentioned, and who uttered 
the bit of ancient philosophy I have quoted, and in 
mongrel Spanish which helped to allay the saltness 
of its flavor. I asked for a little water, and she said 
"^//, 710 hay agna aqui ningimo,'' and I abandoned the 
unreasonable desire, satisfied if I opened a flow of 
conversation instead, w^hich I did. 

The place of her habitation had attracted me 
from a considerable distance by its air of abject 
wretchedness. I knew what I should find there; the 
gypsyish semi-civilized Indians who are the brethren 
of those who were in the missions, who wander hither 
from that long, dry, prickly tongue which is the 
peninsula of California, and w^io know not why they 
come. I call this tattered abode of barbarian pov- 
erty a place for convenience, and a habitation for no 
better reason. It was at the end of a little steep ravine 
which opened into a still wider one, and it had been 
rudely curtained with dilapidated gunny-sacks fast- 
ened upon sticks. The crone sat upon the ground, 
stirring some heterogeneousness with one hand in a 
battered pan, while the other lay listless across her 
knee. A little fire smoked lazily in a hole. A boy 
of twelve sat in the shadow and blinked at me. They 
slept in the sand, and ate upon it, and breathed it, 
and mingled with a little water they must have drank 
it for most of their lives. They were like all their 
forefathers of the earth. 

She did not invite me to enter, or bid me be 
seated, for obvious reasons, and I availed myself of 
a little ragged shade and seated myself on the 



A CONNECTING LINK. 



35 



ground, and her natural suspicion was doubtless dis- 
armed somewhat at the sound of such Spanish as I 
knew. For all these Indians, so far as I know, speak 
that tongue, and are inheritors of the influence of 
that people. Even these were not entirely Indians. 
They wore, after a ragged and cast-off fashion, 
the garments of civilization, and had the general 




MISSION INDIANS OF TODAY, 

demeanor of those who have tasted improvement 
without having fully partaken of it. 

I asked her if she was inclined to think it warm, 
and she answered that it was rather so; not very. 

'' Where did you come from ? " 

^^Abajoj — below. 
"Are you alone ?" 

Then she broke forth into lamentations. The 
burro was gone; her man was hunting for him; he had 
been gone two days; and looking sorrowfully upon 



136 A CONNECTING LINK. 

the ground from beneath raised eyebrows, and shak- 
ing her head slowly from side to side as people do 
who submit patiently to unmeasured affliction which 
is not deserved, she made the remark I have men- 
tioned: ^^Hay dins en que ningima cosa sale Men.'' 

In various forms, meaning the same thing, it is 
undoubtedly a Spanish proverb, and not an Indian 
idea. Therefore, I inquired when she had learned 
the tongue. Her answer was to hold her hand, palm 
downward, about a foot from the ground, as every- 
body does when it becomes necessary to say "ever 
since I was so high," or words to that effect, 

"Have you been here always?" 

She answered that she had always been in the 
country, in various places. 

"And how old are you ?" 

She did not know, "but I was here when the 
Americanos came. I was like that boy; " pointing to 
the youth, who had never removed his eyes from me 
since my advent. 

" Well, who came ? '^ 

She answered that there were ships, and soldiers, 
^^alla abajo,'' pointing to the bay, "_r alia tatnbien en el 
ceree'yo,'' pointing toward the distant hill where lies 
the old earthwork called Fort Stockton. 

This was ancient history too modern. She was 
not beginning at my beginnings, and, meaning no 
harm, I wished her something like a hundred and ten 
years old. Musing upon the question of how to 
begin to find out if she could tell me anything of a 
still earlier time, she took her innings by suddenly 
asking me: 



A CONNECTING LINK. I37 

''Es Usted Padre V 

So she imagined that I, too, might be a missionary, 
and necessarily a clergyman. I do not know how 
many things I may have been taken for in the course 
of my life and wanderings, but the idea of being in 
holy orders was at least new to me. 

But the subject was broached, and I asked her if 
she remembered the Padres of the old times. She 
said she only knew of them through h^r parientes; her 
relatives. These, she said, had not lived at the mis- 
sion of San Diego, but had worked on a rancho of 
the mission; an outlying field or pasturage. This, to 
her mind, seemed to constitute a claim to distinction 
and consideration, and was a reminiscence that had 
dwelt with her during more than half a lifetime of 
wretchedness and squalor, though such wretchedness 
had been the natural condition of her race until the 
Franciscans came, and since their departure had 
again been as from the beginning. For an elderly 
Indian woman she might not have been hideous but 
for the intention they all seem to have of being so if 
possible. I had a vague idea that if she were else- 
where, and some one would wash her, and comb her 
hair, and give her a new cotton gown, and place her 
in a chair, I should like to hear her story. 

I heard it anyhow, for it was a narrative. Indians, 
barbarians of all lands, seem to lack the power of per- 
sonal reminiscence. If it is a tradition, a legend, a 
tribal history, it passes from tongue to tongue through 
dusky generations. It was told in a Spanish as bad 
as my own, and with a badness new to me. Some of 
her phrases I could not understand, and she had that 



138 A CONXECTING LINK. 

geographical nomenclature of the country doubtless 
current and exact with her people, but unkno\Vn ^o 
modern description. I give it as I got it, or, rather, 
as I concieve it to have been. 

"Something very new happened to my great- 
grandmother," she said. " She was gathering acorns 
on the hillside, some one of these I suppose, w^hen the 
ship of the Spaniards came into the bay and sailed into 
the shallow water up there;" and she pointed in the 
direction of what is called False Bay. " She fancied 
at first it was a big white goose; bigger than was ever 
seen; but there were men upon it, and she lay down 
amongst the bushes and waited to see what they had 
come to do. Presently a canoe came ashore with 
men in it, and she ran home to the hut." 

*'Then the Indians came and watched them from 
among the bushes, and they built a house there, and 
every night the smoke arose and the lire glowed. 
This was the beginning." 

" Then some of the people crept nearer and nearer, 
and at last it became known that they were men, 
such as the very old ones said they had heard had 
been here before, and they had hurt nothing. My 
people could have killed them, but it was thought 
that they were not like us, and that they had powers 
that were far-reaching, and they waited for them to 
go away again." 

"But time passed and they did not go. Another 
ship came, and also other men from the South, and 
the Indians grew more accustomed to them. They 
were but men, for they died and were buried, and 
when my people knew this they grew more familiar. 



A CONNECTING LINK. I 39 

We did not know what they came for, but they talked, 
and were friendly, and were not any longer feared. 
Only the women did not go to them. They gathered 
acorns, and heard what others told, and staid at 
home." 

" Time passed. Perhaps it was a year, or two years. 
It is long ago, and I never heard. But one day my 
great-grandrnother was on the hill amongst the little 
oaks. By that time the bells rang every day, and 
these Spaniards went about over the country, and 
talked with the people, and asked them to come with 
them, and gave them things they had never seen 
before. You may think it strange, but up to that 
time the Indians had never seen so much as a knife 
to cut with. And while my relative was there among 
the acorn-bushes a man came, and when he saw her 
he stopped to look, and she ran away. But when on 
another day she was on the hills he came again, and 
again she ran, and this happened many times, he 
calling to her, and she running away. I know per- 
fectly well now how it was. I think she wanted him 
to come there, though she ran, and at last she did not 
run so far." 

And now came into the old woman's face a kind 
of reminiscent smile, and I knew she was thinking of 
the romance of her distant relative with the stranger 
from over the sea. 

'' Well ?" I remarked, inviting her to go on. 

** Then she did not run one day. I suppose she 
only walked, and this mission soldier followed her 
home, and when they came to the hut together, to 
the little place made of bushes where they lived, her 



140 A CONNECTING LINK. 

family were very angry, and drove the man away. 
And the tribe heard of it, and were all angry." 

" And he did not get the girl ?" 

" Ah, no. There was trouble in the hills, and some 
time after that the tribes attacked the mission, and 
pulled down the stones, and killed a Padre and two 
soldiers, and went back abajo.'' 

I had heard of the one Indian attack which dis- 
turbed the days of that peaceful conquest, and was 
surprised to learn, for the first time, that the Gallic 
axiom " Chci-chez la Fe/nme,'" would apply to this diffi- 
culty also. What I was getting may not have been 
good history, but it had the unwonted merit of com- 
ing fiom the other side. To the modern Californian 
there may exist other very good reasons for not 
believing it, since the days for making a casus belli of 
the fate of a squaw are long since passed. But it is a 
fact that prior to the touch of civilization every 
Indian community, of every race and tribe, has had 
its most jealous care in the guardianship of its 
women. To their rule in this regard the Mosaic law 
was mild, and death did not wait for proof, but fol- 
lowed suspicion. Chastity was originally the one 
barbarian virtue alike of Apache and " Digger.'^ 

But it was not a pretty ending to an incipient 
romance. The old woman went on to say that that 
tribe never did come back, and that a long time; imty 
largo tiempo; passed before any of her people would 
have anything to do with the Franciscans or their 
missions. Many other tribes had similar feelings. 
It is an acknowledged fact that, at the time of 
the sequestration, there were thousands of dusky 



A CONNECTING LINN. 



141 



wanderers among these hills whom the gospel had 
never reached, and for whom the missionaries had long 
ceased to care. They knew all about the new civiliza- 
tion, and had been accustomed to see it from a dis- 
tance for more than a generation, but the ineradicable 
" Digger " remained in them. The shelter of rushes 
or boughs, the hole in the sand, the diet of horned- 
toads, bugs, snakes and gophers, and liberty, appeared 




NO GOSPEL THEN OR NOW. 

to them the better part to the last. This old woman, 
dwelling under her flapping shelter, utterly miserable 
to any civilized understanding, occupied a place 
between. She knew, yet had not tasted. In such a 
shelter was she born, and amid such surroundings 
had always lived. She was a California Indian. 
This was life to her, almost worse than the life of the 
old times, but the only one she knew. The doom of 
the heathen who reject had come to her in this life. 
The last remainder of a multitude, she was here amid 



142 A CONNECTING LINK. 

the gradings of inchoate avenues and the signs and 
inducements of the real-estate industry, a "Digger" 
still, and with all this she thought that some days 
were worse than others. 

I asked her if she had not some other story to 
tell me; one that would end better; and she shook 
her head. *' Where do you live when you are at 
home?" I inquired. She waved her hand and 
answered — '' En todas pa7'tes " — everywhere 

''Have your people no place — no country?" 

*' No. Sometimes it is better here, sometimes 
there. There is here more clothing, and there more 
fish. I do not understand the Americans and their 
towns, or where they all come from, or why they 
come. Neither do I the others who came first — the 
Spaniards. Perhaps there was not enough in their 
country, and they came to find better. Perhaps it is 
so with you. You took this land away from them, 
they took it from us. Will somebody come and take 
it from you ? " 

For one moment the vision of a Mongolian seiz- 
ure; of hordes and swarms of yellow faces; of serried 
battalions wearing pigtails, passed before my mind. 
Then I said, "No; no one is coming after us; no 
people can take anything from the Americans; they 
always stay." 

And to this she answered, in the words and tone 
disagreeably familiar to every one who knows the 
tongue or the Spanish ^^^o^^\^.,'''' Qiiieii sabe?''' When 
it comes to that classic remark there is no longer any 
use of discussing the question then in hand, whether 
it be of a transaction in horseflesh or of national 



A CONNECTING LINK. 



^^^ 



policy. This miserable semi-savage memento had her 
opinions, drawn from natural sources. The question 
was like that of a child, whom one can not convince 
against his conclusion that what has happened once 
will happen again. 

Across the ravine from where we sat there was a 
yellow embankment, and a somewhat dilapidated 
railway track. I asked her if the trains passed there. 

" Sometimes." 

" What makes it go .''" 

"I don't know. Perhaps it is the white people's 
Devil" 

" What is the wire for overhead ?" 

"■ I don't know. To catch birds ?" inquiringly. 

I was convinced then that this dusky prophetess 
was a subject for whom a more patient missionary 
than I would be necessary. It was Apache-like; the 
universal Indian; to see a miracle every day; perhaps 
to vaguely wonder; but never to enquire, never to 
try to understand. I changed the subject again to 
her own affairs, and asked her if her people had a 
chief. 

^'No." 

" Then who governs .'" 

*' The man;" meaning of course the universal mas- 
culine. 

"What becomes of your sons .^" 

" Sometimes they work. When there is no work 
they sleep." 

" Have you any house ?" 

" Yes, — this." 

"And when it rains ?" 



144 -'^ COXXECTING LIXK. 

"Then," laughing, "we are very wet. But it will 
not rain soon." 

"What do you do with your daughters ?" 

"Well, they are like other women; just women; 
they go." 

*' What has become of all the Indians .^" 

" Some of us have gone to the desert. Most are 
dead." 

" Of what r 

" Of a disease the Americans brought; this," — and 
she showed with apparent satisfaction some ancient 
marks of small-pox on her wrist. 

"And they died of that; all, and in so short a 
time ?" 

""Mini Jiombre!'' — look here, man — she said, as 
her voice grew shriller; "One gets it; he can't see" 
— bringing her eyelids together with her thumb and 
finger — "He can't hear '^ — putting her fingers in 
her ears — "he is all sick" — making dots over her 
face and arms with her finger-end — "he don't know 
anything" — tapping her forehead. "There is no 
cure. He dies. One after the other goes. All who 
know him die. This year there are a hundred. Next 
3"ear not one." 

The crone was describing in a few words the fate 
of the California Indian. She conveyed to me the 
impression that she considered it the incurable curse 
brought by my people, and purposely. She under- 
stood no more of it, of its cause and cure, of all that 
we consider its history, than she did of why the rail- 
way track was laid, or the whispering wire was 



A CONNECTING LINK. 1 45 

Stretched overhead. She classed it with those diabol- 
ical contrivances. It happened that during all the 
years of the missions there was no small-pox, or, if 
there was, the cases were isolated and the curse sup- 
pressed. Therefore, with all other mysterious things, 
we also brought this, and it wrought havoc amid 
these endless hills. Perhaps it matters very little 
what they may think, but it is the universal accusa- 
tion against us in the helpless savage mind. They 
make no history, not even the history' told by bones 
and piles of stone, but if they did, the story would 
go down to dusky posterity that we killed our prede- 
cessors with charms and a curse. 

To understand the savage rightly it is necessary to 
know that he does not appreciate you. I was not 
making any impression upon this old woman. Had 
what she really knew been capable of being arranged 
in her own mind, she could have told me all I wished 
to know. I do not pretend to the reader that the 
sketch is worth making except to emphasize the fact 
that all that is good in civilization is bad to all but 
the civilized. I had here before me, seated on the 
ground and speaking a tongue I could understand, 
the three periods of the history of the coast: the Dig- 
ger, the Franciscan and the American. The last- 
comer was I, face to face with the first, and, in a sense, 
with all that had gone between. Lacking the stolid 
face and the stupid stare, more than usually intel- 
ligent, perhaps, to her all the past was yet as a page 
torn out. The half-dollar I gave her opened a new era, 
and her day was perfect when a gray and shambling 
Indian made his appearance, not with a donkey, but 



I 46 A CONNECTING LINK. 

with an old gray horse. " Ya ha henido'' she said; "I 
knew something would happen when you came." 

What had happened was more to her than all that 
was gone; a companion for the endless misery and 
squalor which she considered life; the pitiable beast 
of burden who shared the savage lot, and a silver half- 
dollar. When I arose to go I asked her ifshe thought 
this was really one of the days when everything went 
wrong. For the first time she laughed, and in the 
middle of her brown face, and between those un- 
comely lips, I saw the glistening rows of white and 
perfect teeth which are nature's almost only gift of 
comeliness to the aborigine of California. 



CHAPTER IX. 

SOME "ARGONAUTS. 




OME twenty years ago it 
occurred to one of the 
most brilliant and indolent geniuses this country has 
produced to bestow a generic title, a classic name, 
upon that remarkable body of men who were the 
first Americans to truly know California. Those 
were golden days, and their coming was not in vain. 
For then, and almost only then, did the placer yield 
for a body of hopeful adventurers a yellow store 
that could be known by sight as Gold. No capital 
was required; nothing but a pick, a shovel, a pan, 
a "cradle," ''grub" and pluck. This last quality 
acquired among them the name of " sand," and they 
had it, and in many cases it was all they had. But 

147 



148 SOME "argonauts:' 

by it they acquired, in connection with that which 
they came for, the name of Argonauts, which in a 
sense, they truly were. 

Most of them w^ere young when they came, and 
only those who were yet survive. Nearly all, sooner 
or later, returned to " the States " and to a course of 
life not unusual, and have long since more than half 
forgotten all the wisdom of those times, applicable 
only to them and their circumstances, and confined to 
the Pacific coast exclusively. Many a deacon in good 
standing now was not so then. Many an one wdio 
might have been so if he had stayed at home, had 
his chances for being thus distinguished spoiled by 
an experience now impossible in any corner of the 
world. 

To some, perhaps to most, who remained in Cali- 
fornia, was reserved a destiny of which they were 
not, and are not now, entirely conscious. They rarely 
or never married, but this not extraordinary circum- 
stance must be taken in connection with another; 
that in the nature of the case they have, all their lives 
almost, lacked the subtle influence of woman. Mount- 
ain and wood and stream, and other men, have been 
their companions, and now^ at sixty they are what 
is termed "peculiar"; oddities; semi-misanthropic; 
lacking faith in the very axioms of life; not governed 
by the experience which is almost the common inher- 
itance of the race. Wherever they finally go they are 
singularly inclined to live alone, and to make their 
own beds, and do their ow^n cooking and washing, 
and they care not in what solitary nook the one-room 
house they call home is placed. 



SOME ''ARGONAUTSr 



49 



And these veterans of the old time, these Argo- 
nautic relics, are not disposed to shun association 
with their fellow-men. They want it, and like it, but 
they take it curiously. A thousand common ideas 
and experiences are new to them, and, indeed, the 
very commonest are the newest. An ordinary fatuity 
is to wish to do all those things now — except marry — 
which a man should do only in his youth, if at all, and 
to make themselves ridiculous by those performances 
which are expected only of boys. They are boys — with 
gray beards and decrepitude to call especial attention 
to an incongruous fact. Only one other class of men 
bears any comparison with them in this respect, and 
that is the briny mariner who has sailed the wide 
world over, who has visited every clime, and who 
comes ashore at last without having touched the bot- 
tom of anything except the bottom of his vessel, on 
sea or land; a man whose experiences are only wide, 
not deep, and whose beliefs, doctrines and supersti- 
tions, stuck to with the tenacity of a barnacle, amuse 
his fellow-mortals as long as he lives. 

More or less so perhaps is the rare ascetic, monk, 
clergyman or college-professor, whose life, once com- 
mon, can now only be lived by a rare being here and 
there to whom the world is nothing. The precise 
opposite of all such. Argonaut, sailor or scholar, is 
that man whom the times have developed into an 
unequalled radiance, and whom we know, even with- 
out an introduction, as the Commercial Traveller. 

Take a nook in California where three or four of 
these ancient miners have chosen to reside, and their 
pranks are almost surely an unfailing amusement of 



150 SOME " ARGONAUTS." 

the community. They live apart, each one by hini- 
self; and the hotel, or the boarding-house, knows them 
not. They are nearly all "heeled." That is a phrase of 
Argonautical invention which saves tedious explana- 
tion, which means in Texas that one is armed, and 
in California that he has money. To this man a soli- 
tary blanket is a bed, and a pile of straw a luxury. 
He would walk across the continent if necessary, and 
when he had done so would walk back again if the 
town he had "struck " did not suit him when he got 
there. Easy-going and good-tempered, he is yet as 
ready to fight as an old bear, and with as entire a 
recklessness as to consequences. And you never can 
tell when he is going to begin. Silent usually, when 
he meets a man he knew in the old times his gar- 
rulity is grotesque. Yet he will rarely talk of those 
times, and his answers to your questions are merely 
tantalizing. For his idea of them is not yours, nor 
Mr. Bret Harte's either, and they seem to be accom- 
panied in his mind with tinges of regret, not that 
they are gone, but that they ever came. So the story 
of early California, a wonderful one too, remains very 
largely untold. Part of it would be that of men of 
your own race, whose motives and feelings you can 
understand, whose sweethearts, or mothers, or may- 
hap whose wives, lived for thirty years and more after 
they came away, and they never saw them again, and 
do not perhaps now know whether they are living or 
dead. Part of it would be of years of unceasing but 
purely experimental toil, solitary in the river-bed or 
on the mountain side, hopeful ever; tempted from 
day to day; a failure at last. Part would be of the 



SOME ''AR GONA U TS. ' ' 



151 



failures of inexperienced and luckily-gotten wealth, 
gone in a da}^ or a year, and gained in vain. Many 
an Argonaut has these things to carry about, con- 
cealed in the inner consciousness of one who never 
had a home, or reared a child, or knew a sister, or 
repaid the tears or cares of her who bore him. They 
also are part of the " romance " of early California, 
believed in by all who yet linger, and to be added to 
the oddities and crudities, the whims and notions and 
mistakes wiiich are conscious possessions; the inef- 
faceable results of life in a womanless world. 

In some cases society has grown up around these 
old fellows in very late years, and surprised them 
with its vagaries. In such a case they are inclined to 
get together beneath some spreading tree where 
nobody can hear them, and take counsel in regard to 
its necessities. Aslikely as not they may then employ 
a dancing-master, or order blue-velvet suits for a 
projected masquerade, or do both, quite regardless of 
all expense. Having once attended a ball, this man 
will fancy that the way to do it is to do it all, and 
proceed to acquire what he considers the inevitable 
intricacies of the Highland Fling, the Double-shufifle, 
the endless varieties of the professional dancer, and 
all under the impression that these are what one 
should know if he dances at all. Yet he will never 
acquire the figure of a contra-dance as long as he 
lives, and hangs up the delicate fabrics of his mas- 
querading caprice in a closet constructed for them 
alone, wondering why they should seem awkward 
upon him alone of all the giddy multitude. 



152 SOME '' argonauts:' 

Sometimes he fancies that he has neglected his 
musical education, and having lately heard or seen 
something which has had the effect of starting him 
in that direction, he concludes that he will apply him- 
self. Thereupon he orders from some Eastern manu- 
facturer all the pieces necessary for a "brass " band. 
Then he and his cronies proceed to "practice," first 
without a teacher and then with one, making night 
hideous for their- fellow-citizens as long as the whim 
lasts them, or until public clamor forces them to take 
to the fastnesses of nature with their horns. 

Ceasing at last from want of wind, or inability to 
master a score no less difficult to an aged beginner 
than Greek would be, or from the refusal of their 
lips to acquire that little horny callous on the inner 
side which is necessary to every horn-blower, our 
Argonaut never sees the real difficulty, but imagines 
the instruments to be imperfect or the assortment 
incomplete, and thereupon orders a banjo as the one 
remaining thing. Perhaps it is from a private con- 
clusion he has arrived at that anybody can play a 
banjo, even the universal incompetent he has always 
been in the habit of referring to briefly as a " nigger,'^ 
and he is going to come out master of something. 

The tribulations incident to brass horns may be 
largely borne in private, but with the dance company 
is necessary. It is urgent that the feminine portion 
of the community should become interested, and that 
a teacher of the graceful should be hired to make his 
presence felt at the district school-house at least once 
a week. Our Argonaut being willing to furnish the 
money, one portion of this program is easy. It is the 



SOME "ARGONAUTS. 



153 



" wimmin ^' that puzzle his well-meaning understand- 
ing. The duennas who own the pretty Spanish girls 
"play it low down on him" by alleging that while 
they may manage to see their maidens usually well 




AN ARGONAUT. 



shod, — muy Men calzado, as they express it, — they 
can not pecuniarily endure the well-known wear and 
tear incident to fantastic trippings on the school- 
house floor. Unless somebody furnishes the boots 
they can't go next Friday night, and the maiden says 
as much, regretfully but firmly. 



54 



SOME ''ARGOMAUTS. 



This one can not be spared, nor that one, because 
they dance by nature, and so gracefully that the 
Argonaut wonders what is the matter with him and 
his legs. So he says that if that is all he will see that 
she has the boots, and gives her an order on the store. 
Very soon the arrangement, having been, quickly 
grasped by the feminine community and their moth- 
ers, becomes so common that, to save trouble and do 
the thing systematically, he has these shoe-orders 
printed, and they become almost negotiable paper in 
the community. Every girl has a new pair of boots 
from an assortment running remarkably small in the 
sizes, and the feminine support is continued upon the 
preposterous hypothesis that she does not really wish 
to dance, but is willing to do so as an accommodation 
to the A»rgonaut if he will stand the wear and tear. 

Having accomplished so much, and so very easily, 
the Duennas seem to have cast about them for an- 
other scheme whereby they might profit, and there 
is a strong disposition in attempting to describe it, to 
lapse into homely idioms, and to quote the memor- 
able instance of him who, having for once the oppor- 
tunity to take as much as he wanted of plug or pie — 
precisely which of the two not being mentioned in the 
narrative or essential to the moral — proceeded to excise 
considerably more than he could masticate. In going 
about to find out if there would probably be a good 
attendance at the next visit of the dancing-master, 
one demure damsel said she really did not think she 
could go, and yet would not state why. Two or three 
more acted likewise, and again the fate of the enter- 
prise seemed trembling in the balance. The Argo- 
naut was forced to inquire among the male members 



SOME ''Argonauts:' 155 

of the community whether they, or any of them, 
could tell him what was again the matter with the 
"wimmin." Yes, one of them could. The matter 
was that these girls would not dance unless they 
looked real nice, and in order that they might, it was 
alleged to be necessary that some of them at least 
should have a new and more accurately-fitting one of 
those garments whose purpose is to make other gar- 
ments fit, and which is alluded to in feminine serials 
as the corsage. Dolores wanted a new one. 

''And what the blank is a corset?" exclaims the 
miner, " and what have I got to do with them ?" 

And thereupon he abandons for aye the whole 
capricious and precarious enterprise. If he ever 
dances again, it will be as he used to dance in the 
mines; with considerable inelegance, and with a piece 
of his red shirt tied to one arm to designate the sexes. 

But it is not always in the line of the fine arts and 
frivolity that the Forty-niner exercises his public 
spirit. Having no child of his own, and privately 
considering his life largely misspent in that he has 
not, it is very characteristic of him to develop an 
unusual interest in the public-school system. If the 
treasury is temporarily vacuous, he goes into the 
depths and produces sufficient money to tide over the 
difficulty. He is interested in the library, and buys 
books for it, and makes the most extraordinary selec- 
tions of them ever known. He wants banners, and 
what he considers emblematic devices and mottoes, 
to hang upon the school-house walls. He would put 
a globe three feet in diameter on each gate-post, and 
on this globe he would delineate in high colors the 



156 SOME ''ARGONAUTSr 

seas and continents of the world. A favorite scheme, 
perhaps, is to occupy the whole of one inside gable- 
end with a gilt colossal eagle, and under the fierce 
bird to emblazon fourteen stars; thirteen ordinary 
ones and one big one — a " blazer," he remarks — for 
California. And under all this he would say: "The 
Poorest Child may tread the Classic Halls of Yore." 
Then he thinks the school-house would-be about 
right, with all its appurtenances and belongings. 
Curiously enough, he meets opposition in these views 
from his fellow-members of the Board, and when 
he does he incontinently abandons his educational 
projects and turns his attention to some other enter- 
prise, bringing to bear upon it in turn his remarkable 
ideas of what should be. 

The reader will say : " But I myself know 
returned Californians, and they are not like this.'" 
They probably are not ; the fact is readily conceded. 
But those who returned at all did so while still 
young, and their Californian experience is to them as 
the four years of the great civil war are to the vet- 
eran; a hiatus; so much practically left out. But it 
is an experience. Neither the war of secession nor 
the early days of California left their participants the 
same as their fellows are. They think and believe 
differently, though perhaps privately, upon a hun- 
dred subjects. Both were experiences rare, extraor- 
dinary, and impossible of repetition, and are now 
portions of a life apart from that of a new generation 
in a thousand particulars. 

But he who stayed, who adopted for a life-time 
the ways he found in vogue in his youth in a State 



SOME ''ARGONAUTSr 157 

unique in all its periods and in everything, is often, 
if not always, the character so far attempted to be 
described. Any one who will place himself among 
the scenes of those days may have a more or less 
vivid idea of the processes of his education. The 
mountains lie imperturbable on every hand, ethereal 
in the blue haze of the afternoon, and the valleys 
glow in the sunshine. The old red roads wind away 
among the hills, often now grown across with coarse 
herbage and having the air of melancholy the deserted 
pathways of men wear all over the world. The round 
hills are spiked with stumps where once the red- 
wood grew, and a new growth of azalea and alder 
and sumach strives to hide the scars and gashes made 
by the pick and shovel of forty years ago. Old 
flumes have rotted and fallen, and still lie strewn in 
the ravines across which they once carried so many 
miner's inches of water every day, and poured it into 
a hundred " cradles " rocking to and fro between 
the gravel-bank and the growing pile of "tailings." 
Even here and there old cabins lean and rot, memen- 
tos and remains of the strangest domesticity that 
everVas; the womanless and childless little homes 
whose people had been dropped as from the skies 
into this sylvan world, and who lived in them the 
life of a society without law, gospel or school. Old 
dams lie in the streams; old stage-bridges preserve 
still a timber here and there at either end. Some- 
times the rust-eaten fangs of an ancient pick may be 
found among the debris at the mouth of an excava- 
tion. Perhaps at rare intervals a grizzled veteran 



158 SOME "ARGONAUTSr 

may show you where so-and-so got his pile, and half 
wonders that you never heard of him. 

There are graves, too; dimly discernible, but still to 
be known as the long-ago forgotten resting-places of 
the stranded Argonauts, whose comrades left them to 
be waited for, and never to come, in the liome beyond 
the rugged mountains and the endless plains. There 
are little towns, built in gulches and straggling up 
hill-sides, which long ago saw their last inhabitant 
depart, and where now no one ever comes. Their 
hilarious nights have not left an echo, or their reck- 
less days a sign. Fragments of glass may tell where 
the saloon was, and some charred earth where was 
once an hotel, and it is not possible to look at the 
place, and then inquire in vain for its name, and note 
the old road to it, and the faint straggling miner's 
paths that radiated from it up the hillsides, without 
a melancholy reflection upon the transitory nature of 
human schemes and ambitions, where or whatsoever 
they may be. This was one of the most fervid forms of 
American life less than forty years ago, and there are 
left now only the dimmest signs of it amid the mount- 
ain silence and shadows. Nature is already investing 
it with the signs of antiquity; with the creeping grass 
and growing shrubs wherewith she heals the wounds 
of human occupancy, and obliterates the records of 
human struggle and ambition, and asserts herself at 
last empress of all. 

Every reflective man must have his moments of 
looking back, and his wholesome private reflections 
upon the theme of what an ass he has been in his 
time. Of these philosophers the boundless West is 



SOME "AKGONAUTS." 



159 



full, for there they who endured the most now have 
the least. The early wanderers over Kansas and 
Dakota, the men to whom every feature of hill and 
plain was familiar, rounded out their experiences by 
an entire misconception of the final uses of the vast 




IN THE =;0 S. 



expanse, and a total neglect of all opportunities. It 
may be slightly too strong an expression to say that 
the Argonaut who remained in California lives in a 
state of chronic surprise, but any casual observer is 
liable to fall into the error that he must and does. 



l6o SOME "ARGONAUTSr 

Before he came, and while he was arguing the case 
with his relatives, so to speak, he regarded it as the 
land of gold. After he had reached the place he 
remained under that idea — if he could only "strike " 
it. The fever grew, and reached its climax, and 
declined, and he still thought and said that the coun- 
try was good for nothing else. When the early times 
were gone and the gulches were deserted, and the 
placers had " played out," and the "leads" had 
"petered," and his chances were gone, he awoke 
slowly to the fact that California was not the land 
of gold at all, and that the real wealth was in the 
soil. The " greeny " and the " tenderfoot," knowing 
from the Argonautic standpoint nothing at all, came 
and seized upon the opportunities he had neglected, 
and filled up the country he had expected to see 
almost deserted. They diverted his flumes and ditches 
wherever they could, and turned the sage-brush and 
chapparal into fields and farms. It was not El Dorado, 
but a peach orchard; not the country of "camps," 
but of towns; not of wild oats of either the natural 
or artificial variety, but of vineyards and orchards. 

And as time passed the deception grew worse and 
worse. The " desert '' put in its claims. The country 
which the Argonaut never visited; the edge of that 
yellow-and-gray expanse that had killed of thirst and 
dust and hunger so many of his companions who 
only tried to hasten across it; began also to bloom. 
Cities sprang up beside a miserable ditch, embowered 
in tropical foliage, and containing more inhabitants 
than all the Argonauts ever numbered. The waste 
and lonesome acres began to have a value greater 



SOME ''ARGON-AUTSr l6l 

than they would have had if they had been staked off 
as mining claims. People came in greater numbers, 
and with more enthusiasm, and possessed of consider- 
ably more money, than were seen by any of the golden 
years succeeding the historic 'Forty-nine. At first the 
old Californian calmly awaited the miserable failure 
of all this wildness, and knew as one does who has 
had experience that the world had to a consider- 
able extent gone crazy, and counseled with his few 
remaining fellows as to the signs of the times. It is 
not to be denied that sometimes he also partook of 
the benefits accruing, in cases where for a quarter of 
a century or more he had been the owner of lands he 
never really wanted, and hillsides that came to him 
by chance. Where he drifted into South California, 
because there was nowhere else to go, or for some 
similar reason, he often awoke to find himself upon a 
** pocket " very late in life. 

Go where one will on the Pacific slope, at long 
intervals widely scattered, here and there, will be 
found this grizzled memento of the old days. Per- 
haps it may be sitting on a bench in the shade in the 
neighborhood of the old Plaza at San Francisco, and 
there he will refer to the metropolis as " this town," 
and generally speak of it to you as to one who must 
of course readily recall the time when it was a lit- 
tle place, as he dues. Or you may find him in a 
chair in the rotunda of the Palace Hotel; a man with 
a wide slouch hat, a splendid gray beard, and a look 
of prosperity. If one does not insist, and he be in 
the humor, he will amuse you for half an hour with 
desultory talk of those times whose annals have 



I 62 SOME "ARGONAUTS." 

entered into the folk-lore of America. Perhaps most 
prominent to his mind is that great day when the last 
spike was driven, and the first trans-continental line 
was finished across the wide expanse to California. 
It was not expected, he says; it was not even dreamed 
of. Nobody but a phenomenonally-endowed idiot 
w^ould ever have conceived the project. We thought 
the ships were good enough, and the little steamers 
that ran up and down the river. This town was a 
big one in them days, and things was lively; but noiv, 
— since then — Lordy ! 

Then he will laugh quietly at their crudity and 
oddity, and tell you a little more of "them days." 
He will remark upon the enormous prices then ruling, 
and of how he has paid a dollar a pound for flour 
himself; of the Chinese and their advent; of how 
none of the men of those times were poor, and none 
really rich; of the comities and rules that governed 
in a country absolutely without any other law, and 
of the funny things that daily happened to this or 
that Argonaut, now asleep in one of the old graves. 
He tells you where the " heft " of the town was in 
those times, and how it looked, and ends w^ith the 
remark that "we didn't have an idea of the facts in 
those days; not an idea,'' and gets up and goes away 
at the moment when you want him the most. 

So far back as the annals of his family in America 
go, the ancestors of the present writer were all front- 
iersman, and he is therefore perfectly aware of the 
inadequacy of this chapter, or of any chapter that ever 
was written, to do justice to that class which is a dis- 
tinctive product of this country, and which has been 



SOME "ARGONAUTS." I 63 

the vidette of all its greatness. In common with all 
Saxon frontiersmen, the surviving Argonaut is a man 
misplaced in these times, but in his day he was the 
true representative of that sturdy valor which is now 
decaying in wealth and luxury; of that courage which 
then regarded danger and difficulty as incidents of 
daily life ; and of the magnanimity which comes of 
the sharing of a common lot. There will be no more 
of him while the world stands, and his name, in the 
country whose hills he first scarred with his toil, is 
overwhelmed in modern wonders. 



CHAPTER X. 

NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

ARLY one morning 
I saw coming along 
the village street a 
figure that attracted 
my attention with- 
out being in the 
least attractive; one 
of the commonest 
figures of a place 
that is full of an- 
cient oddity to the 
J unaccustomed eye, 
and which is a kind 
of museum of those 
relics which pertain 
to the Californian 
past. 

He was a little 

and dried -up man 

of something,like 

80 years. Mounted 

like a manikin on 

^'1 the back of a big 

white horse, he bore 

i¥' before him a bunch 

-^ of green corn-fod- 

THE DESCENDANT OF A MISSION SOLDIER. (Jcr, and tumcd iu 

164 




JVOOKS AND CORNERS. I 65 

at the gate to a piece of low ground thick with wal- 
nut-trees, between the rows of which the soil was 
studded closely with that peculiar greenery which 
delights the peasant soul, and which, when finally 
realized upon, does not amount to any value what- 
ever; pumpkins and peppers and onions, some spin- 
dling stalks of corn for roasting-ears, and all that 
miscellany which comes under the comprehensive 
head of "garden-sass," and which, so far as all mod- 
ern experience goes, it is cheaper to buy than to 
raise. His weazened face was covered with a short, 
grizzled beard; his head was crowned with a nonde- 
script hat; his garments were old and clean, and he 
had the air of being about his business so early in 
the morning from a mere habit, being raised in that 
way and having always done so, and I conceived the 
idea that here, so far from his native hills, I had 
again encountered a kinsman of Sancho Panza, less 
that bodily appendage which the word '' panza" is 
taken usually to mean. 

A little later I perceived that it was going to be 
a busy day with Sancho. He had an ancient hoe, 
through the eye of which the crooked handle went 
too far on the back side to be convenient for use, and 
the edge of which was demoralized by innumerable 
contacts with the casual dornick. He was in the saw- 
grass beside the aceqitia, busily engaged in making a 
childish little dam of earth across it, and in expecta- 
tion of the coming flood he should turn on he was 
barefooted. There was not any water, the riparian 
proprietors above having temporarily taken the lib- 
erty of cutting it off for their own uses, but he went 



1 66 NOOKS AA'D COJ^NERS. 

on damming just the same, and was greatly interested 
in coaxing the infantile current that remained through 
his little notch in the bank, and in making it go as 
far as possible for the refreshing of three pumpkin 
vines. 

And here I beg indulgence in the tedium of 
remarking that the ground in question did not need 
any water, but rather a " cultivator " wdth a mule 
attached, and afterwards a hoe that would pass 
inspection. This man was but illustrating the ancient 
modes of Catalonia and California alike, and showing 
how a country whose great interest now is in railway 
rates under which to find a market for an enormous 
surplus, was formerly scarce able to raise more than 
enough for the sustenance of a sparse population who 
in their day possessed the choice of all situations and 
localities, with water galore. 

Later, when I went over to pay him a visit, he was 
inclined to recieive me distantly, if politely. But 
when he had finished to the very lips the little brown 
paper cigarette with a grain and a half of tobacco in 
it, I gave him one of the American abominations, 
which are considerably bigger, and his heart warmed 
to me. But he did not light the one I gave him, not 
for the reason the reader would have in not doing so, 
but because he wanted to get the entire good of it. 
Having tucked it away in the recesses of his apparel, 
I am quite sure that, taken to pieces and economically 
administered, that same bit of Virginia long-cut- 
tinctured-with-paregoric lasted him two or three 
days. 



NOOA^S AND COR.VERS. \6j 

Sancho Panza, in California and elsewhere, always 
conveys to a stranger the impression of not knowing 
anything whatever. He is, once started, garrulous 
without saying anything, and loquacious after the 
manner of a parrot or a crow. His mind, like his life, 
runs round and round in a circle. Remind him of 
something; assert a fact; and something by way of 
assent or protest may result. I asked this man how 
old he was, and he replied that he did not know, 
adding the usual '■'' Quicn sabeV 

"Yes, you do," I said; ''you are seventy-six." 

"No. I am seventy^eight." This without any 
reference to the fact of his not knowing but a 
moment previously. 

"And you are distinctly Spanish." 

"Yes, I am a Spaniard;" with some pride, and 
evidently gratified at my discrimination in a matter 
that required no guessing at all. 

'^ You were born here, and so was your father." 

" ^/ Senor; es imiy verdad;'^ and the old fellow 
began to look as though he intended to stop hoeing 
for a moment. 

" And your grandfather was a Mission soldier and 
came with the Padres." 

"It is true, that also; he was a soldier, and he 
came with the Franciscans. Who told you?" 

"Nobody." 

And he did stop hoeing, and with his hands on his 
hips seemed hesitating whether or not he had better 
look into my antecedents as a sorcerer. 

" Come," I said, '^ tell me what you know about 
those times." 



1 68 NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

He removed his head-piece and began to collect 
his thoughts by fumbling for them in his hair. Finally 
getting some of the facts together, he said there were 
four missions — the reader knows there were twenty- 
one — one at San Diego, one at San Luis Rey, one at 
San Juan Capistrano, and the last of them at Santa 
Barbara. The two Fathers at Capistrano, he contin- 
ued, went to all the others to say mass; they had 
charge of the whole business. That being about the 
end of his very accurate historical information, he 
paused, but went on scratching his head, and saying, 
" Si Sefiorj to das, — to das.''' 

The reader will understand that to every Spanish 
peasant his local priest is a bishop, or if he is not 
he ought to be, which is sufficient, and the places he 
has heard mentioned are practically the only ones 
there are, and as for the rest; well, FJ Dios sabe, and 
there an end. 

''And about the Indians; were they many?" 
" Los Indios? — eron muchos, — muchos/^ 
He pronounced it " ;;/6'(?;/chos," thereby betraying, 
a hundred years after, his family origin among the 
peasantry of Catalonia. So I told him, at a venture 
but with an air of positively knowing, that his said 
grandfather was a Catalonian. 

With still greater pride he acknowledged this 
statement also. Every unlettered Spaniard looks 
upon his province as being'the chiefest one of Spain, 
very much as some of our forbears regarded Vir- 
ginia in relation to her sister States and the world at 
large. 



NOOK*S AiVD CO/^.VeJ^S. 



69 



I asked him the old question: what became of all 
the Indians whom he himself remembered having 
seen. He replied at first with an expression which 
simply means that they were, and are not, indefi- 
nitely, but finally added that they all died. His 
remarks on this point were strongly in the line of a 

universal belief 
among Califor- 
nians; that the 
Americans when 
they came pur- 
posely brought 
with them a 
Pandora's box 
which contained 
but one disease, 
but that one of 
sufficient malev- 
olence to make 
up for all the 
others which 
that unfortunate 
woman let loose 
upon mankind. This belief will never be eradicated 
among the few old ones who are left to retain it. 
The more educated smile at this notion, but in their 
turn allege that the Americans "robbed" them. 
They do not say how, nor specifically when, and 
merely mean that provincial carelessness was pitted 
against the far-seeing wits of people who in those 
times did not usually come to California for their 
healths. It is quite noticeable that the robbery has 




AN INDIAN WHO STAID CONVERTED. 



I 70 NOOKS AXD CORNERS. 

now ceased, and that, with all the intensity of mod- 
ern speculation, the later Californian is quite proof 
against the highwaymen who come in palace-cars. 

My friend with the hoe went on with his digging, 
having apparently told me all he knew or had heard 
in the course of seventy-eight years. I give him 
briefly to the reader, not as a unique specimen, but as 
one common in all the corners of rural California. 
He could discern no motive in my questioning except 
to pass the time withal. The world was to him a 
thing vague, indefinite, unreal; a kingdom he never 
saw, an unread book. But he was not crude. The 
indefinable Spaniard v/as in his bones. 

Away across the little creek there was a scattered 
collection of houses, placed here and there on the 
verge of the valley. The yellow hills lay behind 
them, the sun beat down upon them, and around them 
there was no tree or shade in a land where in ten 
years a fig will grow to shadow half an acre with the 
broad leaves from which was made the first apron a 
woman ever wore. But in California poverty is 
robbed of half its sting by a climate which renders 
something to eat the only actual necessity, and while 
the love of flowers is in the Spanish nature" a tree is 
too much trouble. Nearly all of Spain is a treeless 
country. The Spaniard has cut away the natural for- 
est wherever he has wandered. There is a saying that 
the sylvan gods have in the course of ages become so 
angry with him that now he and a tree do not thrive 
in the same locality. The olive, the fruit that makes 
his face to shine with fatness, and the historic vine, 
are the only ones that cling to his waning fortunes. 



KOOA'S AND COI^iVERS. 17I 

I began the day with the Catalonian peasant whose 
stores of varied knowledge I have imperfectly be- 
stowed upon the reader, and now a further thirst 
was upon me to know more of the class the Cali- 
fornia tourist never sees. Taking all risks of being 
supposed to be making parochial calls, I went my 
way across piles of melted adobe, through dismantled 
doorways, among all the debris of last winter's green- 
ness and last generation's decay, toward the little 
creek whose sweet waters seemed to have sprung 
somewhere out of dryness, and to hurry swiftly away 
to suicide in the sea. 

On my way I passed a little adobe where unques- 
tionably there was an assortment of dogs. A huge 
and hideous tawny monster with but one eye lay 
basking in the sun, too old and too decrepit to pay 
attention. But a pert little one, a " cute " dog without 
a hair upon his back, came out and raised an outcry. 
Then an old woman appeared in the doorway and 
observed the situation. A single glance would con- 
vince the most skeptical that she was not an amiable 
old woman, but she took that little dog to task w4th 
some of the most voluptuous phrases of the Spanish 
tongue. *' Come hither thou little thief," she said. 
" Hast thou no shame, to use thy tongue against a 
gentleman who but passes by?" Doing the best I 
could, I thanked her, and the little dog retreated past 
her within doors, receiving as^he went by an adroit 
flip of his owner's apron which must at least have 
hurt his feelings. 

A little further on I met in a shady lane near the 
stream a man who rode a horse and was leading 



\'J2 NOOKS AjVD CORiVEI^S. 

a second. There was a muddy place, and we met on 
opposite sides of it. He stopped his cavalcade with 
a sudden pull, and bade me pass first. In a narrow 
place on the other side two mounted vaqueros had 
roped a cow. In almost any other locality where 
men catch cattle about the horns with a flying noose, 
and, indeed, where they never do, a footman may go 
round as best he can. But these two untutored gen- 
tlemen proceeded to pull the cow out of the way 
bodily, and wait until I was past the difficulty. In 
an instant they were gone the way I came, the cow 
protesting. One of them pulled her along without 
much difficulty, and I regret to add that the other 
seemed to have her by the tail, and that he offered 
her an inducement by twisting it gently, and with 
an artistic appreciation of the effect of caudal tor- 
sion upon the average cow's feelings. 

As I came nearer one of the little houses the effect 
was that of a picture seen somewhere long ago and 
almost forgotten. Four people sat in a row on the 
edge of a little porch; a man, a woman, a boy and a 
girl. The man leaned his arms upon his knees as 
people do who are accustomed to seats without backs, 
and the woman's chin was in her palms. The two 
children had the attitudes of youth the world over, 
and the girl was a comely child. But they were not 
Californians, but Mexicans. No one who has often 
seen the Aztec countenance will easily forget the 
indescribable something which marks its lineaments. 
There is the same similarity in all Mexican faces that 
there is in the faces of Egyptian sculptures, and there 
is, besides, a real or imagined kinship between the 



XOOA'S AND CORNERS. 



1/3 



lineaments of the Egyptian and the Mexican. The 
last is a face that causes people to come away and 
say that the curse of God rests upon the Republic of 
Mexico. It is an impression they have, drawn from 
an unknown source. The native Mexican is not a 
laughing man. A sadness dwells in the universal 

countenance ; an 
inheritance, per- 
haps, from the 
old days of com- 
munal slavery 
when the Inca 
was lord of all; 
the times when 
the huge cylinder 
of carved granite 
which lies in an 
open court in the 
City of Mexico 
had a side of it 
'made smoother 
than the rest by 
the dragging over 
A "MESTIZO." -^ Qf bodies for 

human sacrifice. The native Mexican is also a man 
of greatly more ability than he has ever been given 
credit for. It must be rememembered that he was 
subjected to the demoralizing rule of Spain from the 
Conquest of Cortez to the year 182 1, and yet recov- 
ered his country; that there are nine million Mexicans 
and less than two millions of Spaniards in Mexico 
now; that the greatest man Mexico ever produced. 




174 XOOA^S AXD COK\ERS. 

Benito Juarez, a name venerated in tlie remotest 
mountain hamlet, was an '^ unmixed " Indian, and the 
cast of his face, resting beneath glass in the National 
museum, shows all the sadness which marks the uni- 
versal countenance of his ancient race. 

And this man and his wife were Mexicans, and I 
wondered how and why he came here. He told me 
in his first remark, and seemed unwilling to be mis- 
taken for one of Spanish lineage. He came, as a 
soldier, to assist in marking out that boundary 
between the two countries whose homely last monu- 
ment stands at the point where probably Junipero 
Serra first saw the harbor of San Diego. The theme 
started him upon his country and its ups and downs, 
and the subject of his profoundest hatred I found 
to be old General Santa Ana. He had it mostly 
wrong, and his accusations were not based upon the 
facts of the case. That man was undoubtedly bad, 
but he did not intentionally lose the battle of Buena 
Vista, or sell Texas at so much per square league, or 
line his private purse with California. In his vehe- 
mence this man named over to me all the territory 
Mexico had lost, and counted the prices on his 
fingers, and told me why until I felt ashamed of 
myself, and his woman sat and listened, and kept 
tally by nodding her head. He knew more than my 
Catalonian friend had ever heard of, and wherever 
he was wrong he stuck to it. But when I told him I 
had seen the place where Maximilian was shot the 
woman came closer and listened, and ejaculated "_y 
lapobre Carlotfa,'' with a sigh. The " touch of nature " 
which '' makes the whole kin " exists in California, and 



NOOKS AND CORNERS. I 75 

in the heart of the wife of an ex-private of the Mexi- 
can army, as it does everywhere else. 

Like all his class, this man was also poor. He 
told me sadly that he owned nothing and was a day- 
laborer. I tried to argue the case with him, and 
pointed out how he might thrive by renting the very 
soil he lived on. He had the usual story: "I need 
ploughs, and horses and seed, and where is the money 
to buy them?" Would that some profound philos- 
opher would explain to me why everywhere outside 
the lines of Saxon blood there exists this peculiar 
fatalism as an attachment to poverty. 

There is one exception in the, grotesque personality 
of the remarkable man from China. California, where 
these others toil and starve, is his bonanza. He can 
not explain, for he never learns to speak the English 
tongue, or the Spanish either, and he is besides not 
a man of explanations. Alone, or in pairs, he comes 
creeping unheralded down the valley, and his earliest 
care is to see some land-proprietor. So early in the 
morning that the fog almost hides him, one may see him 
on hands and knees, creeping about between his rows, 
never stopping, never looking up, working always. 
Just opposite this Mexican, on a little piece of ground 
deserving only the designation of a "patch," two 
Chinamen have earned eighteen hundred dollars in a 
single year. He is not a man of conventions; he never 
resolves this or that; he knows nothing about the 
labor question; he is hated for these very negative 
qualities, and imposed upon and oppressed in every 
conceivable way, yet by steady persistence he is the 
uppermost man in that savage contest that nature 



I 75 NOOKS AXD COJ^XERS. 

and circumstance and organized society are waging 
against the toil by which the world lives. One is 
astonished at the results of his barbarian intellect in 
a land w^here he has no friends, and looking upon him 
one is half converted to the theory that the whole 
labor agitation is a mere Utopian search for a recipe 
that shall enable a man to be a producer and yet not 
labor. 

Everywhere is John, friendless yet happy. Long 
ago he washed over all the tailings of the Argonaut, 
and tied his gains so securely in a corner of his rai- 
ment that no one knows whether he or the original 
miner got the most. Long ago he knew every nook 
and corner of California, and was a feature not alone 
of the by-streets and alleys of the town, but of all the 
rural nooks. The triangular acre left to the wild mus- 
tard at the mouth of a canyon is his w^orld, and the neg- 
lected corner cut off by the highway or the railroad, his 
empire. He is almost of the old times, for he came among 
the first and was the perpetual victim of the Argonaut. 
Tens of thousands have come and gone since then; a 
host so lacking in individuality that they seem an end- 
less procession of automatons. He is in no sense one of 
the proprietors of the country, for his opinion of it is 
that he does not wish to own it. He is a pilgrim and 
a stranger, with an affection for his native land which 
is as unusual and unique as all his other qualities are. 
Everybody knows him, not as an individual, but as a 
Chinaman. He takes the back seats, and the sides 
and corners, and the alleys and the tumble-downs. 
The native Californian, the Mexican immigrant, the 
Mestizo, all look down upon him and laugh at him, 



NOO/CS AA'D CORA'ENS. 



77 



while he makes more money every year than they will 
ever see, and it is very largely his toil, and certainly 
not theirs, that has made the present California at 
which they are surprised, and which they will never 
understand. Presently, whenever he wants it, he 




A COUNTRY FAMILY 



will have this Mexican soldier's house, and till the 
ground the other is afraid of, and pay a cash rent, and 
go back to China wealthy. 

Originally intended as the land of Nothing-to-do, 
rural California shows everywhere to-day the remains 
of that dissipated idea. Under a spreading sycamore 



I 78 NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

somebody is always slowly washing clothes. Upon 
the stony highways somebody is always walking 
slowly along. Wherever there is a bench a row of 
persons is always sitting. There are two words indis- 
pensable to life, and one of them is todavia — ''not 
yet/' and the other is ;;^(?;7^//^ — ''to-morrow." It is 
not that there is any intention of not doing at all; 
the idea is merely to wait a little, to see about it, 
to hasten slowly. For the same man who says 
^^ inafiana'^ is capable of prolonged hardship without 
complaint, or of daily doing the same task over and 
over for fifty years. His head is idler than his hands. 
His few inventions are all in the domain of common 
life, and none of them seem traceable to a single 
individual. All he knows his father knew before him; 
all he believes is the property of the ages; all he suf- 
fers is the common lot. There was never before such 
a unity of purposes, opinions and ways in an entire 
community as exists in one of the places forgotten 
by the "boom." There are no " cranks." Everyman 
goes without suspenders, and every woman has a 
shawl over her head. The scene is pleasant and the 
idea attractive. Except a mountain village in New 
Mexico, or mayhap a coast hamlet in New England, 
there is no other corner of America where this peace 
in daily life may be found. It is impossible to con- 
vey a sense of it in words. It is accompanied by a 
picturesqueness not only of scene, but of language 
and thought. There are no books here, yet the old 
provincial Spanish remains unchanged through the 
years. There are no newspapers, yet there is always 
something to talk about. There are no anniversaries 



AWOA'S AND CORNERS. I Jg 

of their own, yet all the Fourths of July come and 
go unnoted, the one ridiculous gala-day of a people 
who have no church '* fiestas," and who can do no 
better. 

From the times of Miss Hannah More and " The 
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," there have been many 
references to '' decent poverty " as a virtue. But to 
carry the idea to the extent of everybody being decent 
and everybody poor in a whole community, has not 
been thought of. The idea is nevertheless carried 
out fully among that small remainder of the old times 
whose destiny it probably is to see the last of their 
kind who shall ever live north of the Mexican boun- 
dary on this continent. It is one of the puzzles, and 
the Americans can no more understand such a situa- 
tion than the Californian can, in his turn, understand 
the ways and ideas of the Saxon. There is neither 
luxury nor squalor, neither plenty nor want. Where 
so much can be obtained, so can more likewise, and 
the process is almost endless. It is an axiom; self- 
evident and indisputable. Yet you must come away 
from the by-ways of California knowing that it is 
not an axiom, and not necessarily true., One has seen 
no squalor, heard no complaints, been asked for no 
alms, and has been treated as an equal. The things 
he has about him have excited no envy, not even 
remark. Ignorance and dignity, courtesy and inde- 
pendence, poverty and self-respect, have been found 
together. You have found no woman who did not 
know all the rules of ladyship, and no man who wore 
his hat indoors. Every man or woman you have met 
has saluted you without either solemnity or effusion, 



l8o NOOKS AND CORKERS. 

and every little boy or girl has behaved as though 
carefully trained in good society. Yet they have 
lived, in all their generations, and time immemorial, 
in Spain and in California, beyond the extremest 
verge of luxury and outside of the remotest tradi- 
tions of wealth. Decency, to some others an unat- 
tainable thing even after penury has gone, is to these 
an inheritance, and that elderly shepherd of Miss 
More becomes a bit of pious tawdriness by com- 
parison. 

The time must come, and soon, when there will 
be no more of this. The nooks and corners where it 
yet abides are passing away. Names, the melliflu- 
ous names they deliberately composed when there 
was plenty of time to stop and say them in will 
remain, even though San Bernardino has become 
'' San Berdoon," and Los Angeles '' Loss Ang," and 
San Francisco submits to a hideous abbreviation 
which dates back to a period when the commodity of 
time first began to be scarce in California. Since 
1 82 1 Spain has been slowly reclaiming her own again, 
not from across the sea, but through the cemetery 
and by Plato^'s doctrine. In a brief twenty-five years 
the very nook I have in my mind as I write has lost 
eight-tenths of its people, never returning and never 
replaced; dropping out of the unequal contest and 
away from the changed conditions; dead from Saxon 
contact; lost; gone. 

This is but a little interior picture of Spanish fate 
and Indian fatality that may be reproduced a thou- 
sand times from the histories that cover only a hun- 
dred and ten years. The strange thing is that the 



AWOA'S A IV D CORNERS. I 8 I 

alleged reasons for the disappearance of the Indian 
are not those which entirely account for that of the 
Spanish-American. As for him, the few that may be 
included under the head of the "rising generation " 
are going by the shortest roads. The "saloon^' com- 
pounds are his very evident passports. But all Span- 
iards, by immemorial custom, drink, and something 
in addition is also to be looked for. His race has fallen 
into a sleep. Repose in his surroundings, changeless 
custom, immemorial tradition, life in death, rest, peace, 
are his requirements. When I come again the old 
Catalonian will have ceased to irrigate his little patch, 
and the Mexican soldier will have joined his regiment. 
The singers of love-songs in the wayside saloon will 
have ceased, and the dogs will have lost a mistress. 
The whole locality will be changed and nothing but 
the hills, the winding valleys and eternal sunshine will 
seem familiar. Tradition and a Spanish name will 
remind the passing stranger, perhaps, that here for 
more than a century flourished all the quaintness of 
monk, soldierand peasant, and that from here departed 
the last davs of Old California. 



CHAPTER XI. 

AN OLD DIARY. 

'T^HERE was among the Franciscan Friars who 
were at the College of San Fernando, in Mexico, 
awaiting preparations for the great Missionary expe- 
dition to Alta California, one named Palou. There is 

no telling pre- 
cisely what this 
priest's especial 
education con- 
sisted in, or how 
it happened that 
it devolved upon 
him to become 
the historian of 
the beginnings, 
but he was so, 
and in vigorous 
and beautiful 




"the original californian." 



Spanish narrates the story of that first journey into 
the wilds of California in such a manner that a gentle- 
man whose acquaintance with the region is wide 
and long, has told me he could take Palou's journal 
and locate v/ith reasonable certainty every camping- 
place of the first expedition. 

But the story was not written for publication, or 
as history, and is tedious after the manner of the 
times and the Spanish fashion. Cervantes himself 



AJV OLD DIARY. 



'83 



lacked the faculty of condensation, and there are 
pages of insufferable tedium in every old Spanish 
author. Long before starting chapter after chapter 
is used in telling why such and such a thing was 
considered best; what the Virey thought and what 
intentions he had; and inientras this and par supuesto 
that. A man named Galvez was Virey, or viceroy, 
and through and by him was done everything that 
was done. He was a man of ability, conscience and 
prudence, with an enormous faculty for detail and a 
genius for inventories, who doubtless saw in his mind 
every need of a system of missions the most exten- 
sive ever planned by one man, and who pre-arranged 
every camping-place, and yet knew no more, nor did 
any of them, of the geography of the region or the 
character of the natives, than does a reader of this 
page who never saw California. Indeed, he did not 
know so much. No adult need now be puzzled bv 
the problem of where to find Monterey. 

The information Galvez had to go upon and make 
all his minute arrangements by; the data upon which 
he ordered equipment, money, provisions and soldiers; 
was contained in the record of the voyage of Viz- 
caino, who '' surveyed " and named the Bay of San 
Diego only a hundred and sixty-seven years pre- 
viously, had miscalculated its latitude and longitude, 
had mislaid the port of Monterey so seriously that 
the Padres could not find it, and who, with all his 
mariners and *' pilots," had been long beyond later 
explanation or recall. This is but an example of the 
disposition of those queer times to follow precedent 
and observe routine, and is, besides, pre-eminently 



1 84 ^^ OLD DIARY. 

Spanish. They spent a year or two in perfecting 
minute arrangements for the occupation and conver- 
sion of a country they had never seen, in implicit 
reliance upon the word of a sailor who seldom or 
never w^ent on shore, and for the sole reason that 
Philip, a King of Spain, had sent him, and nobody 
had gone with equal authority since. 

They knew nothing of a matter of still greater 
importance — the character of the California Indians. 
It is certain that had these been kindred of the Iro- 
quois or Hurons, or even of the Mojaves or Piutes, 
the destruction of the expedition would only have 
occupied them for a matter of two or three hours. 
For the Spaniards were but a handful in the mount- 
ain wilderness, and their weapons were not as effect- 
ive as the Indian bow-and-arrow. They carried tents 
and litters, and were burdened with the care of what 
Palou refers to as ^^ las bestias /' the drove of long- 
horned cattle which were the best things Galvez had 
thought of. Besides their camp-equipage, they had 
their church furniture,* more bulky and more neces- 
sary perhaps than the reader imagines, and said mass 
every morning before starting out on the day's march. 

* Palou gives the following list of necessaries provided and carried to San 
Diego : 

Seven church bells; ii small altar bells; 23 altar cloths; 5 choir-copes; 3 
surplices; 4 carpets; 2 coverlets; 3 7-oquettes ; 3 veils; ig full sets of sacred 
vestments; 17 albs, i. e., white tunics; 10 palliums; 10 amices; 10 chasubles; 
12 girdles; 6 cassocks; 18 altar-linens; 21 purificadoriesy or chalice-cloths; 
I pall-cloth; 11 pictures of the Virgin; 12 silver chalices; i silver goblet; 
7 silver vials for sacred oil; i silver casket for holy wafers; 5 silver basins, 
or conchas, for baptism; 6 censers, with dishes and spoons; 12 pairs of vina- 
gres, for wine and water; 1 silver cross, with pedestal; i box containing 
Jesus, Mary and Joseph; other smaller articles too numerous for mention; 29 
metal candlesticks; i copper dipper for holy water; another list of little 
things; 3 statues; 2 silver " dazzlers;" 2 crowns and rings for marriages; 
5 consecrated stones; 4 missals, and a continued list of stands, laces, silks, 
linens, etc., etc. 



Ah' OLD DIARY. I 85 

A quaintness not to be conveyed by any transla- 
tion pervades the minuteness of the diary of this first 
white man's journey in California. It was on the 
afternoon of the twenty-fifth of March, 1769, that the 
expedition started out from Villacata through the 
cactus, northward into the unknown. Sometimes 
two or three little children start to go somewhere. 
They have entire confidence in their ability to find 
the place, and know whom they shall meet, and what 
they shall have, when they get there. They take the 
world as they have found it so far, and are undaunted 
by difficulties they do not know of. Sometimes they 
really succeed in making the journey. So did these 
Missionaries in reaching San Diego, and even finally 
Monterey, and the Providence that guided them can 
not have been very different from that which pro- 
tects little children. 

Meantime, amid all these pious desires and coun- 
selings about petty things, and looking out for bells 
and chalices and robes and altar-cloths, affairs of so 
much more moment were progressing on the oppo- 
site side of the continent that it is very doubtful, in 
the full light of the past, whether or not the enter- 
prise of the Padres and the Virey aft'ected in the 
least the final result as we see it now. They added 
an illuminated page to history, with "D. O. M." and 
a cross at the top, and ''Requiescat in Pace " at the 
bottom, while the Atlantic Saxon was setting down 
the first lines of a long, red, momentous historic 
chapter. For George III. was King of England. 
All non-believers in the divine right will excuse the 
not original remark that he was a very addle-headed 



I 86 AN OLD DIARY. 

monarch, who about these years, 1768-69-70, was 
unconsciously, with all the assistance he could get 
from his ministry, laying the pipes, so to speak, for 
the final floating over California, and all the rest of 
this continent, of a nondescript banner whose size 
and shape, whose azure field and stripes and stars, 
had not yet been dreamed of. While this cowled 
and helmeted company were starting out on this 
coast, twenty-five newspapers, mostly devoted to 
sedition and rebellion, were being printed and issued 
on the other. The tea excitement was beginning. 
The citizens were refusing to comply with the pro- 
visions of the " Quartering Act,^' and were turning 
out of doors the soldiers they intended to begin kill- 
ing as soon as convenient afterwards. Before the 
hidden Monterey was finally discovered the " Boston 
Massacre " had occurred, and a thing the Virey never 
heard of, and would have contemplated with horror 
if he had, a " Liberty-pole," was cut down in Boston 
by the imported "hirelings" who might better have 
left it stand. While the San Carlos and her sister- 
ship lay in the Bay of San Diego, carrying their sacred 
stores and their church bells ashore, and burying 
their scurvy-slaughtered seamen in the yellow sand, 
on the opposite coast the Gaspe was being burned to 
the water's edge. The bells upon one coast were 
ringing in the advent of monarchy; those of the 
other were ringing it out. Mass was saying beneath 
tents and trees, accompanied by the noise of fire- 
arms, while to the same accompaniment the Puritan 
divine was explaining, to suit himself and his 



A A' OLD DIARY. 



187 



hearers, the meaning of that Liberty which is in the 
gospel, wherewith ye are made free. 

Strangely enough there are in Palou's jourxial no 
exclamations of pious joy at the long-dreamed start- 
ing out of that expedition which was to bring the 
** gentiles" unto the light. They said mass and 
departed to the North-north- ^^;^ ^£^^^ai aJ 
East, carrying with them all 
the water they could, and 
stopping the very first night 







THE MOTHER MISSION: 
SAN DIAGO. 

only a league away, 
''where there was no 
forage for the beasts." This journey which began on 
March 25th, 1769, has been skillfully made the most 
of by very excellent and well-informed, but enthusi- 
astic writers, but to whomsoever has chased Apaches 
through the mountains of New Mexico, or made the 
overland journey to California in the early iimes, 
there would seem nothing very appalling about it 
except its uncertainty, and nothing heroic except 
its object. It required to make it from the date 



I 88 AN OLD DIARY. 

mentioned to the 14th day of May; fifty days; and 
the distance traversed, including a thousand twistings 
and turnings, was about six hundred miles. No cold 
impeded them, or rivers, or swollen streams. It 
rained, and even that hindered them so grievously 
that they waited in camp until it ceased. There is 
much simplicity in the chronicler's accounts of how 
'' we were all made very wet," and " it rained so hard 
this night that the Seiior Commandant invited me to 
put my bad tent under his good one," and " every- 
thing being very wet, we did not march today, but 
waited for our clothes to dry." 

As in hundreds of journeys since made, the 
finding of water was the chiefest difficulty, but, so 
far as the record shows, not a single night was 
passed without sufficient for themselves, though the 
poor '^bestias " had sometimes to wait until morning. 
This was the beginning of that endless record of 
"dry cramps" which every soldier and plainsman 
knows, and also of that old story of grass-and-no- 
water, and water-and-no-grass which have alternated 
with each other in endless monotony through the 
entire '^ trail" history. Sometimes they had them 
both in abundance, with "Uanuras," and plenty of 
valley land, and then the chronicler, after looking the 
country over, sets it down in his journal that it 
would be ''a good place for a mission." One is 
amused at the closeness with which the country is 
observed and described to this end, and with how 
few mistakes, and the language is such as would be 
used to this day by a practical man to describe a 



AA^ OLD DIARY. I 89 

situation available for farming purposes in Cali- 
fornia. In all the years that followed no missions 
were planted in Palou's places. To this day his 
route remains almost as tenantless as it was in 
1769, and only the ranchman's cattle have drunk of 
his streams and ''pozos/^ and pastured upon his 
"llanuras"' and ''buenas tierras " few and far 
apart. But he was moved by a holy covetousness 
whenever he saw them. The growths he describes 
by Spanish names with superior aptitude and judg- 
ment, and sometimes he alights upon those ^^ rosas de 
Casiiila, cargados de rosas " — roses of Castile, burdened 
with flowers — which almost excite his enthusiasm. 
A monk and the abstruse sciences may go together 
with some propriety, but when he sets flowers down 
in his journal, not in direct connection with Mary 
and her month of May, one may know that he sighed 
as he wrote, and thought of his youth and his native 
land. 

There is a notable difference in Palou's expressed 
opinions of the country as he comes further northward. 
The second day out, losing patience with a monotony 
and barrenness than which there is hardly any more 
oppressive in the world, he makes the oft-quoted 
remark that " it is a country in which nothing abounds 
but stones and thorns. ^^* It is almost the only sign 
of weariness in a diary that was written every day on 
the spot, out of a peripatetic inkhorn, and under cir- 
cumstances that usually require some retrospect to 
give them anything like a tinge of rosiness. The 

^ " La tierra sigue como Us demas de la California, esteril, siiida, falta de 
zacate y agua, y solo abundante de piedras y espinas." 



IQO AN OLD DIARY. 

barrenness of the route seems then to have been 
largely where it is yet; south of the Mexican boundary 
line; and the Spaniard of a later day, with the singu- 
lar fatality that accompanies .him, lost most of the 
good and kept the bad. Even on that day when the 
monk tried all the afternoon to make some " Hostias;" 
— some wafers of flour with which to celebrate the 
mass — "and did not succeed in taking out a single 
one that was fit," he makes no remark except a refer- 
ence afterwards to his mala suerte;h.\s "bad luck;" 
and merely adds in the next day's record that they 
went without services that morning. 

But it is the Indian, the utterly abandoned 
aborigine of those times, who especially invites 
his attention. The journal inevitably gives the 
reader the impression that there were many of 
them. They appear almost every day, and always 
a new tribe, with some new variety of savage amia- 
bility or diablerie. He touches them only here and 
there descriptively, and manages to convey in a few 
words a graphic picture of them and the nature of 
the souls he and his companions had come to save. 
Wherever at that time he had procured the word 
" rancheria,'" as expressive of a congregation of Indian 
dwellings, he had it, and it has descended to all who 
have since lived where such settlements are to be 
found. They were encountered almost every day. 
Sometimes their inhabitants were inclined to be 
friendly, at others a little inclined to inquire at a dis- 
tance the nature and character of their visitors. The 
expedition had with it some natives of the peninsula 
of California who had already been reformed at one 



AN OLD DIARY. 



^9 



of the missions of that country; say at Muliege, a 
name the present writer, if the reader, would not 
recognize or even pronounce, had he not once had 
the doubtful pleasure of visiting the spot, where now 
remains not the remotest indication of the presence 
of Jesuit, Franciscan, or aborigine. These Indians 
grew ill. Some of them died. Some of them 
^'- Jiiiyeron'' — ran away to join their people again, 
discouraged by unwonted wanderings from home — ■ 
and after them, '' misguided, ^^ the reverend journalist 
sends his blessing, couched in terms forgiving, but 
probably not appreciated by the fugitives had they 
known them, with their views of life, friends, and 
the sterile homes they had known from birth. While 
they were sick they were carried in litters. When 
they died they were given the rites of the Church, 
and their bodies were buried in the wilderness, *' and 
at the place of their sepulture we planted crosses." 

To all the Indians they met they gave the little 
conciliating presents barbarians love, and once or 
twice, when vaguely threatened, "<f/ Sefior Comniaud- 
aute " directed the soldiers to fire their guns, but not 
toward the savages. This had the effect desired of 
scaring them away, and the expedition proceeded. 

Once in a while Palou gives his private opinion 
of these people, notably those seen when near their 
journey's end at San Diego. One aged native, he 
says, was found sitting on a rock by a rancheria, every- 
body else being apparently away from home. When 
asked to guide them, the trusting savage got up and 
took his bow and arrows and cheerfully went along as 
far as his services were needed. When dismissed with 



Ig2 ^A^ OLD DIARY. 

presents, the reading of the narrative gives one the 
impression that he complacently trotted back home 
again, ''muy contento,'^ and precisely as though he 
had known white men from an unknown world all his 
life. Several times it is noted that the men were 
entirely naked, and the women nearly so. Of others 
that they are "Indians very lively, jokers, childish, 
swappers or bargainers, deceivers and thieves/' 

There is sometimes a touch of Spanish humor, 
which, when it can be recognized by the alien at 
all, is the quaintest in the world. " Hardly in the 
proper way," he says, " do all the men and women 
go about entirely naked, as was Adam in Eden before 
sinning, not having the least shame in presenting 
themselves before us without making any attempt at 
covering otherwise than as though the garment 
nature gave them was a court dress." 

He tells of their houses, which he states with the 
gusto of a modern Western journalist were made of 
\\diy —''^ zacate" — and how immediately afterwards 
they discovered that these primitive dwellings con- 
tained inhabitants who were very active and lively, 
and great thieves. One of them "stole from the sol- 
diers, without anybody seeing him, some spurs and 
'sleeves' (arm-guards made of leather which soldiers 
wore), and from a priest who tarried here on a feast- 
day and said mass, the altar-bell and his spectacles, 
which he hid in the ground near the altar, and 
which cost much work in finding again, for which 
reasons they called that some Indian Barabbas." 

This remarkably Indianesque specimen whose 
chicanery was thus embalmed in history, played his 



AX OLD DIARY. 



193 



pranks on "el padre presidente " himself, on the 
journey in search of Monterey. On such small 
points does history often turn, that one pauses in the 
reading of the quaint narrative to wonder what 
would have been the consequences had Father Juni- 
pero's big iron-framed '' anteojos" never been found. 

Of the gentiles found on still another day the 
reverend chronicler says : " They are very distinct 
from former ones, very 
pacific, humble and affable; 
during the day they were 
with us with as much con- 
fidence as if they had been 
with their own." 

And of others still suc- 
ceeding: " They are Indians 
quite too lively and active, 
great beggars and very 
covetous of all they see 
which suits them, great 
thieves; they are great bel- 
lowers in their manner of 
speech, and when they talk 
they speak with shouts as though they were deaf." 

The predominant animals of California are referred 
to in almost biblical terms as " conejos " and " liebres," 
and one thinks first of the Psalmist's "conies" and 
afterwards of those gray and alert creatures doubtless 
as plentiful then as now, who never allow a journey 
to become lonesome. Whether by the term " liebres " 
he meant the pervading "gopher" of these days one 
can not precisely tell, but the pouched rodent who has 




DIGGER AND WIFE. 



194 ^'^' ^^^D DIARY. 

galleried and mined the country over and over a 
thousand times, and who never tires in his tunneling, 
must have attracted his attention. The Indian who lived 
far enough north sometimes made himself an impe- 
rial robe of rabbit skins. It required seventy of them 
to make a single garment, and they walked into the 
traps he set for them with a carelessness which clearly 
indicated the cheapness of life among the rabbits 
both of those times and these. Birds are also men- 
tioned, not as important, but rather casually, and he 
amuses himself and the reader, by giving them Span- 
ish familiar names, as though they could not bear 
others with any propriety in the presence of this expe- 
dition. Indeed, the essence of Spain lives in Palou's 
journal unconsciously, and he judges even the Indi- 
ans he was to convert from the Spanish view-point, 
and evidently forgets the natural difference between 
the moral standards of the Indian and the white man. 
To the reverend Padre, these poor creatures were 
comimitting some mortal sin every day of their lives, 
and every hour of the day. Lying, theft, and a 
shrewd and yet clumsy dealing with daemons and 
witches, are among the virtues of savages. Treach- 
ery and deception are boasts, and cruelty is a harm- 
less amusement and pastime. He whom they named 
" Barabbas " for peccadilloes which with any other red 
savage would have been exchanged for murder and 
rapine, suffered in his reputation from an ascetic view 
of virtue which he never appreciated even after his 
conversion, if, indeed, he ever came under the influ- 
ences of the gospel. 



AN OLD DIA R Y. I q 5 

Setting down the points which occurred to him 
from day to day as he journeyed through the wilder- 
ness, the author of this old diary falls under but one 
criticism. Unconsciously writing for the future, he 
does not say enough, and his conceptions are nar- 
rowed down to his one ambition, the sublime search 
for souls. Now that this quest has had its day and 
is over and gone, now that these "gentiles " are dead 
and the missions abandoned to the past and decay- 
ing where they stand, one wishes that the journalist, 
with his command of the best resources of his beauti- 
ful mother-tongue and his clearness of perception, 
had not been a missionary at all, and that he had 
seen even more of those temporalities his brethren 
afterwards appreciated so well. 

The diary takes the reader to San Diego, telling 
very briefly of the sensations and joys of reaching 
that haven, and producing somehow the impression 
that the issue had been considered a doubtful one, 
and that at least so much had been permanently 
gained; for even the ships waited for them doubtfully 
and they were filled with joyful surprise at seeing the 
ships. It is, indeed, almost impossible for the pres- 
ent reader to rightly understand how blind and grop- 
ing were these first journeyings in California; how 
the most intelligent could form no conceptions of the 
probable happenings of the morrow; how all the sea 
was an enchanted waste, and all the shore was a tierra 
nueva no civilized man had ever trod. It is the contrast 
between then and now that adds so much historical 
interest to a priest's journal, and imparts a pathetic 
touch to early gropings in a land now so thoroughly 



196 .■1^' OLD DIARY. 

known, and so much better than the Padre dared to 
think it was. 

After San Diego comes the part which should 
have been so much easier, and was in fact so much 
harder; the search for the port of beautiful Monte- 
rey. The wanderers could not find it, and returned 
suffering, sore and unsuccessful. But they discov- 
ered instead, and without any idea of its importance, 
the real Bay of San Francisco, and Palou doubtless 
set it down as " a good place for a mission/^ Viz- 
caino or Cabrillo had never seen it, and the splendid 
piece of land-locked sea-water, entered by its narrow 
gate, is for the first time certainly and authorita- 
tively described in this diary of a monk upon whose 
most brilliant conceptions never dawned the dimmest 
dream of that which should follow the temporary 
and futile occupation of himself and his brethren. All 
the world knows now how little impression the actual- 
ities made upon either the Franciscans or their fellow- 
countrymen generally. For seventy-seven years no 
country was more entirely left alone by its owners 
and ail the world beside, than New California. The 
scheme which incubated for more than a century 
and a half, and which was nevertheless a kind of 
spasm when it was put into final effect in the expedi- 
tion of which this old diary is the official record, left 
its political originators exhausted with the effort, and 
they died and did no more. 

It remains yet further a historical fact that the 
missionaries extending after Palou and his compan- 
ions in a long semi-apostolic succession for more than 
seventy years, specially desired thus to be let alone. 



AN- OLD DIARY. 



T97 



\ 



They loved the autocratic power of isolation, and the 
unquestioned spiritual dominion which has been 
sweet to the heart of the cleric of every sect and 
time. No enthusiastic and rosy descriptions seem to 
have been sent back to Spain through all these years. 
They were reserved in all their fullness for another 
people and a later time. Above all were heretics not 
wanted. No student feels obliged to accept the opin- 
ion, when it is a matter of opinion, of any one man, 
though it be embodied in an article in the average 
encyclopedia. If one did, and were inclined to go 
with the majority, he would readily understand that 
when in this ancient diary the reverend father pointed 
out the "good places,^' he had in his mind visions of 
the wine and oil that should flow therefrom, and the 
clerical happiness that should surround them. But 
it is not true. The toilsome journey is surrounded 
with every element of self-sacrificing heroism. One 
may smile at its difficulties in the glaring light of the 
present, but so he also may at the recollection of 
the blunders he made last night in threading the 
familiar intricacies of his own chamber in the dark. 
The first light that was shed on the Californian soli- 
tudes was from the camp-fires of this expedition of 
the good year 1769. 

Nevertheless, the strangers came; strangers not 
Spaniards. As early as 1830 they began to emerge 
from the deserts of the East like hungry shadows. 
Bearded Russians drifted down from the icy solitudes 
which were theirs in the far Northwest. Stranded 
sailors touched the shore and became enamored of it. 
In the year which saw the last scenes of the religious 



198 AN OLD DIARY. 

history of California, five tliousand persons crossed 
the endless plains to enter a land whose rocks were 
not yet known to be veined and crossed with gold. 

The vexed souls of the Padres may rest in peace. 
The act of the Mexican government was not nec- 
essary. Sequestration would have come by the 
eternal law of circumstances, and had they stayed 
the missions would have been surrounded and 
engulfed by alien and heretical adventurers, and five 
more brief years would have seen the end of the 
halcyon rule which has had no paralled in the story 
of civilization, which illustrates the irony of fate, 
and which goes far toward convincing the cold 
and carping that he was right who said : "There are 
no such things as principles ; there are only events. 
There are no such things as laws ; there are only 
circumstances. A wise man embraces events and 
circumstances to shape them to his own ends." Yet 
to the "wise man " who rightly sees, it rather seems 
that Palou's old journal forms the first scant human 
record of a drama that was set by the Almighty upon 
the green hills whose destiny He knew alone. 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE ORIGINAL CALIF ( ) R N I A N. 

N the Century Magazine for July, 1889, Mr. Frederic 
Remington contributed a chapter about Indians. 
In closing he allows himself 
to express that sentiment 
which is almost universal 
among those whose fate has 
led them into anything like 
personal acquaintance with 
the tribes and kindreds of 
the original American, and 
says: ''I thought then that 
the good white men who 
would undertake to make 
Christian gentlemen and 
honest tillers of the soil out 
of this material would con- 
tract for a job to subvert 
the processes of nature." 
■i In the same issue of the 
same magazine (see page 
THE DIGGER'S ANTiPODE;— 47 ^his and Other opinions 
A PUEBLO WOMAN. of Mr. Remiugtou are duly 

apologized for by a writer w^ho must have seen the 
article in manuscript, and who made his apology in 
deference to that peculiar form of public opinion 
which knows the American Indian for the reason that 

199 




200 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORXIAN. 

it never saw him, and understands him perfectly 
because it is not acquainted with him, and accounts 
for itself and its existence by promulgating the unas- 
sailable creed that it believes " in the development of 
public opinion not only favorable to an award of 
exact justice, but in knowledge of the real character 
and capacity of the Indian himself," and also that 
"what can be done with the Indian is no longer a 
matter of speculation. Much has been done in educa- 
tion, in agriculture, in social organization, and in 
diffusion of the spirit, occupations and habits of 
civilized men." 

That coterie of the unconverted which is composed 
of such as do not know the Indian because they are 
personally acquainted with him, and do not under- 
stand him because they have lived with him, await 
the facts, circumstantial and in detail, which should 
follow every such enunciation of the creeds of the 
philanthropists. They never get them, and are 
denied the pleasure of either disproving them or of 
personally conducting a committee of philanthropists 
into the fastnesses where alone they may be found, if 
at all, and whither the philanthropists hesitate to go 
by themselves, and, in fact, do not go, notwithstanding 
the aforesaid advancement in " the spirit, occupations, 
and habits of civilized men." It has been discovered 
that it is of very little use to visit Indians unless 
one comes back. The "friends of the Red Man " are 
anxious to do him a substantial benefit. Their way 
of doing it has been to "awaken public sentiment," 
and they have not very well succeeded except in the 
mistake of regarding the Pueblos as " Indians," and 



THE ORIGINAL CAIJFORNIAN, 



20I 



declaring them to be examples in proof of their posi- 
tion. The Pueblos have not materially changed in 
perhaps a thousand years. It is doubtful if they are 
"Indians" at all. The public has for many years 
been asking for something more statistical and exact 
than either Uncas or Ramona. There was also one 
lone and solitary Indian saint. 
Her name was Katherine 
Te-gah-Kou-i-ta, and she 
belonged to a tribe in its da}' 
subject remotely to the Chris- 
tian amenities of the New 
England where most of the 
friends, the influential friends 
at least, of the Red Man and 
Brother have always dwelt. 
This saintess was so good that 
*'she mingled dirt with all she 
ate:" not in the casual tribal 
way, but so that the viands 
really tasted of it to her; and 
thus died, half-suicide and 
ha]f-ii)artyr, 3'et probably only 
of acute inflammation of the 
duodenum, and the general 
public declines to accept her as an advanced example 
of either. 

So far as the great body of Indians is concerned, 
such advancement as they have made has been 
brought about not by the voice of philanthropy or 
the action of the government, but by the simple 
physical fact of the disappearance of the beasts of 




PUEBLO CxIRL. 



202 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 

the chase, and, notably, by the extermination of the 
bison. They have advanced, for the simple mind of 
the child of nature has grasped in all its complexity 
the tergiversation that beef is beef, whether it comes 
from under a spotted hide or a brown and shaggy 
one. Corn is an old thing to them, and the squaws 
raise it anyway. As to staying on his reservation, he 
simply don't, and only pretends to for reasons of 
policy. He has adopted the hoe as he did the white 
man's gun, because it is more effective. These, in 
brief, constitute his ** white man's ideas." There are 
not so many "outbreaks'^ as there were, merely 
because he is burdened with herds of horses and 
cattle which he does not wish to scatter and lose, and 
the situation has come about without his intention, 
and much to his personal disgust. His education at 
Carlisle or Hampton ends in his re-adoption of the 
blanket, or, if it does not, it is time the frontiersman 
should be pilloried for the slanders he has been 
uttering in defying civilized mankind to produce a 
sworn roster of two dozen names of those who have 
graduated and yet retain the garments of their scho- 
lastic days. 

There is, in some respects, an exception, and that 
exception is he who will be attempted to be described 
in this chapter. He was the Original Californian, and 
he has avoided all discussion as to what shall be done 
with him now by mostly going himself before the ques- 
tion had attracted other than that merely cursory 
public glance which is given to a crime already com- 
mitted. In his prime he was unique in his savagery, 
and in his decay and death pathetic in his refusal of 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 2O3 

the conditions which suited or were accepted by all 
other peoples and tribes who were independent, 
treaty-making powers, and yet "wards of the govern- 
ment." The Padres came and found him as he was 
originally, the " Digger," the completest savage the 
continent ever knew. They did not investigate him 
beforehand, and knew him not when they came, and 
had the notions of him that were then or a little 
earlier current in regard to. all Indians. He was dif- 
ferent from the others, very luckily for the mission- 
aries. During the entire history of the Franciscans 
in California he never killed any of them but once. 
Their first entrance was unobstructed, and they pos- 
sessed the entire land in peace. This singular white 
mark across the page of American history is not to 
be accounted for entirely by the peaceful mission of 
the fathers, since conquest by occupation is neverthe- 
less conquest, and ?o in a brief time have all the tribes 
save these regarded it. They were too barbarous to 
have the idea of a property in the soil, too easy-going 
to observe continuous and gradual aggressions,and too 
timid to fight even among themselves, with all their 
numerous tribes, any other than bloodless battles of 
braggadocio and shouting between the lines. When 
rarely they did fight nobody was much hurt. They 
formed in two lines and made much noise, and tried 
to scare each other. Sometimes two champions had 
a duel between the opposing forces after the manner 
of David and Goliath, and, honor being satisfied, 
both parties retired to their places and everybod}'' 
went home. 



204 ^^^ ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 

The Spaniards had, in their turn, the usual ideas 
of the times above referred to, and some of these 
notions are curious as matters of reference. Early 
misconception of the Indian, not only in Europe, but 
by those who had full opportunity for observation on 
these shores, was something almost grotesque. They 
were judged not as Indians; not as one looks upon a 
barbaric curiosity; but by the standards of the times. 
And among those standards was surely one which 
varied considerably from that of later times in regard 
to female loveliness, for it was said by some of the 
earliest who saw them that they were ''tall, hand- 
some, timbered people," and that among the women 
were some " that while young are verie comelie " — 
" many pretty brunettes and spider-fingered lassies." 
" Brunettes,^' forsooth, and "spider-fingered " quotha. 
Doubtless these wilderness-saunterers had not seen 
a woman for so long that possibly grease-paint and 
strings of buckskin seemed to them like silk and the 
folds of ancient lace. 

Meantime the Indians returned these compliments 
by regarding the whites of those times as supernat- 
ural beings. There seems to have been a general 
mutual misconception. 

The general idea was that all Indians were really 
born white, like everybody else, and even the acute 
Jesuits thought their peculiar color was due to long 
exposure and " beards grease." One historian states 
that " all their babies are dyed w^ith hemlock bark," 
and therefore had a literal " tan," and even William 
Penn gravely says that they were " dark, but by 
design." 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN 



205 



In those times all petty chiefs were "kings," and 
the tawdry and rancid "heap big Injun ^' was not the 
fiction and humbug of these irreverent days. The 
reader knows that there was a question about the 
legality and propriety of the marriage of a girl who 
used to turn handsprings and stand on her head for 
the delectation of a frontier garrison, and known as 
Pocahontas, to a plain man 
who was only a commoner, 
merely because " Poky " was 
a "princess."' There is some- 
where in old files still to be 
found an ofificial letter of 
those days which was ad- 
dressed to "The Emperor of 
Canada." 

Our Pilgrim Fathers had 
^ an idea that the incantations 
of their Medicine Men really 
could and did bring rain, and 
Roger Williams and Eliot 
were more or less inclined to 
the opinion that in them the doings of the Devil were 
graphically illustrated. Firmly established as they 
were in the idea of the wandering personality of one 
Satan, and they themselves being Children of Light, 
the Pilgrims almost universally accused these savage 
necromancers of some hidden connection with him 
whom they called " ye Devill, which entereth into ye 
hearts of ye unconverted." It was an easy solution, 
and convenient, theologically, of the simplest and 
most transparent of savage humbugs. But Brainerd, 




FROM THE PENINSULA. 



206 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORXIAN. 

Champlain, Whittaker, Josslyn, Roger Williams, and 
others, really believed in the genuineness of the 
Indian witchcraft and sorcery, and that the results 
of them were supernatural. 

All the literature of these times in regard to 
Indians is a display of learned folly. There was 
among other items, a discussion of their origin, which 
was returned to with tireless industry. Adam being 
their natural father, and white people being, as they 
should be, those for whose origin there was no 
necessity of accounting, the question was where did 
Indians come from, and why were they as they were. 
They were the children of Canaan, the son of Ham; 
the Lost Tribes, etc., etc., and the question that has 
never been settled, and which there is no great 
necessity for settling, agitated those grave minds 
severely. Those primitive days, as compared with 
the present, are themselves a study in evolution, as 
ours will undoubtedly be to the days which are to 
come, with only the difference that we know we do 
not know, while those laborious and conscientious 
personages were sure of themselves. 

It will become necessary in the course of a few 
pages to refer to the actual results of the missions 
to these original Californians, and the reader will 
find upon investigation that the saddest page of the 
story, on both sides of the continent at the same time, 
has similar outlines. A very competent authority 
declares that "the patient heroism of the French 
* Jesuits must always excite admiration, but their 
labors for the Indian race have produced no larger or 
more enduring result than those of others who have 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 20 7 

spent themselves in the attempt to elevate the Ameri- 
can savages/" One of these was he who said ^^ Jbo et 
11071 redibo,^' and went back to death among the human 
beasts whom he knew he could not convert, and who 
he also knew would kill him with tortures indescrib- 
able. These Jesuits are especially mentioned because 
what they and the Franciscans could not do with the 
incorrigible savage could not be done, and was never 
done, by any others. Brebceuf was one of these, and 
he died brave and defiant amid tortures the most 
hellish that could be invented by that fiendish inge- 
nuity that has descended through all the tribes of the 
American Indian to this day, some forms of which 
the present writer has himself seen, to haunt his 
dreams until his dying hour. Marquette was one, 
dying at last on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the 
midst of a wilderness to whose throbbing commercial 
heart men now resort from every land. But even the 
Jesuits did not succeed, much less the Protestants, 
some of whom used, in not unnatural indignation, to 
say that the way to change the savages was to cut 
their throats; merely an ancient version of the 
apothegm of General Sheridan. They caught young 
Indians and sent them to England for training, and 
*' they only learned the vices of the English." A col- 
lege was founded in Virginia, and ten thousand acres 
of land given it. The principal of the institution 
was killed, and the very germ exterminated. The 
students of every other school invariably relapsed 
into savagery just as they do now. The utmost 
zeal went unrequited; the most conscientious labors 
were without avail, and in certain private letters 



208 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 

which have been spared it is found that the mis- 
sionaries sometimes spoke what they thought of the 
Indians of that day, and their sentiments do not 
greatly vary from the atrocious opinions of the non- 
philanthropist of the border at the present time. 
John Eliot, the "Apostle to the Indians," is the pride 
and praise of New England Protestantism, and one 
whose greatness as a Christian and a man can hardly 
be overestimated. In robe and crown he doubtless 
stands now with his opposites in life; with Breboeuf 
and Marquette and Jogues; in the shining ranks that 
guard the battlements of heaven, "and in the service 
of Him who measures not by any human standard 
of creed or of success. He translated the whole 
Bible into a dialect spoken by only a few thousand 
people, and thought it worth while, and it remained 
a few years afterwards an indecipherable curiosity 
which had never been used, and almost all his efforts 
were in the end quite as useless. The piety of his 
Indian converts began and ended at a very low 
mark on the scale of right living. His most trying 
experience was the moral instability of his people. 
His educational schemes all failed, his only Indian 
college graduate died at twenty years of age, and 
others, after conversion, engaged in Philip's massacres, 
among them the very man who, as the only Indian 
printer that ever lived, had helped him to issue his 
famous Bible. And finally the remaining converts 
to the faithful work of all these great and good men, 
though Christians only after a modified Indian stand- 
ard of piety, proceeded to die. Alike^ in New Eng- 
land and California, the virtues of the white man, his 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 



209 



pieties, morals and beliefs have been as fatal to the 
Indian as his vices. John Brainerd, another veteran 
Indian Missionary, was constrained to say at the last: 
"There is too much truth in the common saying, 
'Indians will be Indians.'" It may be much to say, 
and shocking to the reader, but the great mass of 
testimony which must be elic- 
ited upon any careful examina- 
tion of the history of the beings 
whom we call Indians, will 
show them changeless in a 
character for which the word 
" awful " is only slightly de- 
t scriptive; going steadily down 
to extinction and oblivion 
unchanged by any power, 
human or divine; with the 
forms and many of the acutest 
sensibilities and passions of 
men, yet in all their history 
incorrigible as the hyena whom 
the cage never tames 
But since the whole early history of missions on 
the Atlantic coast is written in blood, and that of the 
Pacific is margined only by the marks of submissive 
stupidity and final decay, and both belong largely to 
the same period, some curiosity is excited upon the 
question of the difference, and why ? Serra and his 
companions went to meet death if necessary, and 
were willing to meet it, and it was intended that this 
beautiful solitude should be consecrated by the blood 
of martyrs if it should be the will of God. Instead, 




INDIAN types: — APACHE 
CHILDREN. 



2IO THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA N. 

they met with both a success and peace hitherto and 
since unknown in all the annals of the faith. In thirty 
years or less their converts had become their ser- 
vants, and they themselves were no longer self-deny- 
ing missionaries, suffering in the cause, but haccndados 
wearing an ecclesiastical uniform, and managing vast 
and productive estates with a commercial acumen 
and an agricultural knowledge never before so com- 
pactly stowed beneath shaven crowns. Success was 
so great that zeal was disarmed, monastic vows were 
forgotten, prayer and faith became merely forms. The 
causes of so unwonted a victory over Satan among* 
the gentiles might have been searched for in that 
realm of miracles which in those days constituted a 
close environment of the holy life and the monk's 
cell, had it not lain still more plainly in view in the 
character of the gentiles themselves, and it is not a 
new inquiry which asks after the personality of the 
first man who, for historical purposes, may be called 
a Californian. 

Temescals; Guenocks, Tulkays, Socollomillos, 
Sueconies, Pulpones, Tolores, Ullillates, Matalanes, 
Salsos, Quirotes, Ahwashtes, Ahltomes, Tulomos, 
Romenores — all the barbaric designations of tribes 
the savage tongue could twist, represented one general 
character with differences only important to them- 
selves, and that general character is expressed by the 
term by which the Americans called them when they 
came and found their successors; — plain "Digger.'^ 
This has until date passed for the general term apply- 
ing to all that was aboriginal in California. It con- 
veniently expressed contempt and described a mode 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA^. 2 I I 

of life at the same time, and at a period when, in 
regard to both Indians and Americans, it was not the 
custom to inquire too closely after particulars and 
antecedents. 

The tribes were so numerous at the advent of the 
Franciscans that a new one was discovered, and often 
two or three, with every day's journey. They all 
spoke differerent languages, and each occupied its 
own territory. No attempt at any confederacy had 
apparently ever been made, and there was not even a 
crude and incohate form of government for each sep- 
arate tribe. Every soul in their country did as seemed 
unto him best, and yet never did those things w^hich 
some rule or regulation or some other tribe of Indians, 
or some tradition, thought he ought not to do. There 
was among them all no form of worship, and prob- 
ably not any idea or theory of religion. Bancroft says: 
" The Mission Fathers found a virgin field, whereon 
neither God nor devil was worshipped." 

None of them worked, and they knew no form of 
industry. Even in such a land as South California 
they were not tillers of the soil. The spoils of their 
chase were gophers, rabbits, sometimes snakes, lizards, 
bugs, mice, grasshoppers. Roots they ate, digging for 
them with their lingers and nails. They caught fish 
on the coast, but had few or no boats, and used only 
that bundle of reeds called a " ^z/^<z,"still to be found 
among their wild descendants on the upper waters of 
the Gulf of California. They were sometimes armed 
with that universal and effective weapon of all ages and 
times, the bow and arrow, but with them it had its 
weakest form, and often was absent entirely. Their 



2 12 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 

habitations were such that the house of a beaver or 
the nest of an oriole were wonders beside them; rude 
and temporary shelters against the sun only; holes in 
the ground; burrows; dens; and most frequently 
they had none at all. Their clothing scandalized the 
Padres by an ostentatious absence of any at all in 
the case of the men, and by only some " twisted strings 
in front, and the skin of an animal behind," in the 
middle of the body in women. Sometimes they 
fended against the cold, such as there was, with a 
garment of mud from head to foot, and by the time 
it dried and cracked and fell off, it was warm again. 
From the North to the South, the further one trav- 
eled the lower and more degraded he found the 
Indians. Those whom the Franciscans converted 
and utilized were, save that they were of divers tribes 
and tongues, all of a kind, yet of so many kinds that 
details are conflicting. There was an infinite diver- 
sity of tribal names. Sometimes one tribe had three 
or four names, sometimes, apparently, none at all. 
Often they had a designation for themselves, while 
all outsiders took the liberty of calling them by 
another and different one. Occasionally they earned 
for themselves the reputation of being most prodig- 
ious and unnecessary liars by calling themselves by 
one name among themselves, and by another among 
strangers. Every two or three leagues of the early 
missionary wanderings would show a new cluster of 
huts, or booths, or holes, inhabited by a new tribe 
with a distinct language, and the people of these 
" ra?icherias " were accustomed not to interfere with, 
or even to casuallv know, each other. Near where 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA N. 



213 



now stands Santa Barbara there was a place known 
as Dos Pueblos, " two towns," where a little estera, or 
sea-swamp, lay between, and the inhabitants of the 
one village considered the inhabitants of the other to 
be foreigners, and the estera was an impassable bar- 
rier. At the mission of San Carlos de Monterey there 
were eleven different languages spoken by the con- 
verts, and at San Francisco nine- 
teen. The Indians of San Luis 
Rey de Francia and their near 
neighbors of San Juan Capistrano, 
were totally different, and those 
of them that are left remain so, 
and yet all the tribes and kindreds 
came under the general designa- 
tion of ''Diggers" from an uni- 
versal shiftlessness which made 
them akin. 

On other details the sparse 
chroniclers who deign to mention 
them greatly differ. One speaks 
of people ''of an olive color, 
very light, with rather comely 
women." Another tells of "broad-faced squaws of 
almost African blackness." To this day one observer 
of old California will say that the Indians he has 
seen are very black, while another will think those of 
his acquaintance rather fair. There are in mission 
annals no stories of any great lewdness of custom or 
life, but Powers, a writer in the Overland Monthly, 
has said that all their unmarried women were com- 
mon property. Thus, while the general life of the 




INDIAN types: — 

PUEBLO SCHOOL-GIRL 



2 14 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA N. 

original Californiari might be fairly included under 
one description if it was bad enough, totally different 
impressions' might be produced if the history was 
only that of a single tribe. The rule was at one time 
accepted that all deteriorated as they lived nearer 
the coast, those in the northern interior being said to 
be "very superior, and approaching more nearly to 
the races of the plains," which, if they did, leads one 
to the conclusion that the idea of superiority is also 
a merely relative one. No rule seems to have held in 
the matter of locality. To this day one tribe is some- 
what superior to another, or the reverse, quite regard- 
less of habitat or visible cause, while the despairing 
axiom that "Indians will be Indians'^ holds good 
with all. Ethnology comes forward with her rever- 
end verdict and declares that in all probability the 
Californians were of a different stock from all other 
aborigines of the continent, and describes them 
cheerfully, thus: Complexion, darker than copper- 
color, nearly black; low, retreating foreheads; black 
and deep-set eyes; square cheek-bones; thick lips; 
very white teeth; long, coarse, black, bushy and 
abundant hair; very little beard, with exceptions to 
the rule; nose of the African type; figure of medium 
height and physical development average. The 
incompatibility of this general figure with a personal 
docility which is beyond dispute, ethnology does not 
attempt to account for, and the curious " gentile " the 
Padres found and converted remains very much a 
puzzle in all except his passing away from among the 
denizens of earth. 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFGRNIAN 



2^5 



Almost naked, with only a strip of something 
round the waist, or dressed as Palou describes them; 
wanting no house save a shelter from the sun in sum- 
mer and a hole in the ground in winter; knowing no 
law but lax custom, and almost without even the time- 
honored tribal magnates known as '' chiefs;" they 
found sustenance in the offal and droppings of 
nature, and knew but two industies : the plaiting of 
tule or rushes, and the preparation of acorns as the 
only standard food they knew. The first they made 
aprons and built shelters of, the last was an acrid 
staple of the tribal larder which nobody seems to 
have eaten since. One of the troubles of the Padres 
with them was that they would not wear clothes, 
discarding them and mis-wearing them the moment 
they were out of sight. They had no "pots and 
kettles'' of any kind, and the Monos and other tribes, 
whose remnants still linger, do not have or need them 
now. The interior agriculturist, who at "killing 
time " heats water in a barrel by putting hot stones 
in it, unconsciously imitates the earliest cookery 
known to humanity. The vessel was a water-tight 
basket in which water was made to boil and the 
acorns to cook by a continual putting in and taking- 
out of heated stones. The vietate; the mill upon 
which the Mexican woman grinds away her life in 
making tortillas; is the savage invention upon which 
these boiled acorns were made into meal. Then 
they scooped out a hole in the running stream and 
set the basket of meal there until what we would 
call the tannin was washed out, boiled it again to 
make " mush," and ate it. Nearly every acorn had a 



2l6 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA^. 

worm in it, and it was counted a good year when 
such was the case. California is not a country very 
plentiful in grasshoppers, but such as there were in 
those times were made the most of. They dug a 
ditch, and formed a line of young and old, and 
encircled the insects and drove them into it. Their 
only provision for the gloomy season when grass- 
hoppers were not, was to string them on a filament 
torn off of a yucca-leaf, like beads, and dr}^ them. 
There were lizards and " horned toads" in plenty, 
and occasional snakes, only two varieties of which 
are poisonous. All these were so much food to the 
gentle aborigines. When one now sees the grotesque 
bird called a " sage-hen," or '' road-runner," skurrying 
across the dusty highway with the yellow belly of a 
horned toad gleaming crosswise in his beak, he can 
not but think of the hilarious avidity with which, 
under the same circumstances, both would have been 
chased by the early Californian. When in these 
times you visit Yo Semite, walled with the colossal 
magnificences that make your inner consciousness 
throb whenever you think about them afterwards, 
and which teach you then and there that you have a 
soul, you may remember that it was an ancient fastness 
of the Californian, discovered first by white men 
who chased him thither. The aborigines did not 
go there for scenery ; it was a famous place for 
acorns, and, perhaps, grasshoppers. There is no 
legend or tradition to indicate that he ever looked 
up, up into the blue beyond the immeasurable 
heights with any quickening of his sordid heart, with 
any new-born dream or idea of the possibilities of a 



THE 0RIGIh\4L CAIJFORNIAN. 



217 



hereafter in which even the grandeurs Yo Semite 
must sink into insignificance. 

And, withal, the Californian was semi-herbivorous. 
He preferred of all diet the blossoming clover of the 
country, or what was called clover from its similarity 
to that familiar fodder of civilization. Omnivorous- 
ness would there- 
fore seem to be 
one of the orig- 
inal traits of 
humanity, and a 
freak not origi- 
nating with Bel-j 
shazzar. These 
Indians are de- 
clared to have 
grazed in the 
herbage on all- 
fours like sw4ne 
or cattle and like indian types: — vuma children. 

them to have grown fat upon the diet. 

Like their kinsmen, the Yumas and Mojaves of 
the present, they had great skill in the making of 
baskets. That which is to civilization almost an 
impossibility, the weaving of a vessel of grass or fibre 
which is W' ater-tight, was to them easy. They could 
also, in common with all other savages, chip arrow- 
heads out of flint or obsidian, and grind shell beads 
and drill them. The greatest skill in these industries 
existed before the missionaries came, and is found in 
the contents of graves made many a year before. 
As in other regions, there are in these and similar 




2l8 THE ORIGINAL CAIIFORiXIAN. 

finds Strong indications that as the unnoted ages 
have passed they have seen successive tribes and 
kindreds come and pass away, each one without a 
record, a monument, or a line of history. The last of 
the shadowy procession has now gone by, leaving 
only the impression that the story of the human race 
has never been written, but that even as guessed upon 
and imagined, it is the saddest story the silent aeons 
know. 

These people had one unimportant characteristic 
which seems an index to the gentleness with which 
they welcomed the Spaniards. They loved flowers. 
The Padres found them garlanded and smiling 
beneath the very bloom which is the glory of their 
lost country to this day. Perhaps the idea is not 
new, but if the reader 'will recall his facts from the 
general history of missions, he will find that wher- 
ever this redeeming trait has existed among savages 
there has been proportionately less difficulty in per- 
suading them to adopt the only faith which teaches 
that love redeems. The converse is so nearly true 
that redemption from the natural heathenism which 
loves blood and not bloom is rare, individual, and an 
exception. But they also loved paint. What are 
now the New Almaden cinnabar mines were in the 
old times the scene and cause of much of the tribal 
strife. They wanted vermillion to make themselves 
pleasing withal, and were willing to fight for it. 
But while, in these days, the love of paint has gone, 
that for flowers remains. One can not always know 
whether the California cottage belongs to a Spaniard, 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORXIAX. 219 

or an Indian or a Mestizo, but there are always flow- 
ers there. 

This Mestizo, meaning a mixed one, a half-breed, 
is not a curiosity, and not at all discreditable to his 
ancestors on either side. The Spanish mission- 
soldier was a womanless man, and he took this flow^er- 
loving heatheness to wife. Panza was a good fellow 
in a way, and the Roman faith knows no divorce. 
One of the very strongest means of grace at the dis- 
posal of the Padres was the sacrament of marriage. 
When one sees the Mestizo now he reflects upon the 
curious mingling there of two histories, and the days 
they recall, and this same man or woman is perhaps 
the most pathetic creature in the California of to-day, 
for they represent to the observer something they 
are not conscious of themselves. Child of conquista- 
dor and of bug-eater, there rs a story on either side 
which, separately considered, seem too far apart to 
ever be embodied in a single individual. 

There is something so barbarously unique in the 
clouded and doubtful story of the original Califor- 
nian, much that is so contradictory, that the genuine- 
ness of the best attested facts about him has been 
doubted or denied. Almost all travelers have unhes- 
itatingly placed him in the very lowest notch of the 
scale of humanity, yet against every superficial 
reason wdiy he should be so. There is no fairer land 
than California, but the argument that this fact has 
any tendency to produce better grades of humanity 
seems fallacious. Here was a man who tilled no 
ground, 3^et was anti-nomadic in the strictest sense, 
so that each little tribe became an amusing and 



2 20 THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 

ridiculous parody upon the national idea. He was idle 
because the fertility of his native land rendered toil 
unnecessary, and clothed and warmed and fed him. 
Because of idleness he was not a fighter, for ambition 
and laziness do not go together. Even in the arid- 
ness of Arizona do we find the remains of past civili- 
zations, and the fever-haunted swamps of Darien are 
the burial-places of vast cities. Further northward 
has in all time raged the fierceness of tribal warfare, 
and lived the thirst of glory and conquest. Only in 
the golden mean of California do we find, simple, 
amiable, sordid, idle, not races of hunters and wan- 
derers, but whole tribes of those who live upon roots 
and herbs and insects, who sleep in the sun, who 
burrow, who have no God and no devil, no law and no 
rights, who garlanded their heads with flowers, and 
who yielded to the first touch of the invader, and 
readily and easily became his converts and his serv- 
ants. Heaven or hell or angel they had not, and 
took what was given them. Possessing themselves 
no theory of origin or destiny or fate, they presented 
no arguments against that which was brought to 
them. "Tillage and fixed dwellings must precede 
the advent of a new religion and a new code of law." 
So Eliot found, and the Franciscans gave both these 
to the Californians as a preliminary. Eliot's Indians 
wished to know why God did not kill the devil and 
have done with him, and it is not known what answer 
the apostle made to this unexpected and logical 
irruption of the bete noir oi theology, but these Cali- 
fornia amiables never thought of that heroic remedy 
for all human sin and sorrow. 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN 



221 



And now, after a brief seventy years, came the 
inevitable end. Everything the Indian had or knew 
had been abolished suddenly. The routine of his 
aimless life, the want of custom of his race, was 
utterly changed. Infinitely more than he had ever 
had before was given him if he would only work, and 
hell was made apparent to him if he 
would not, and he therefore worked 
and w^as given to. Care was taken 
of him. He was not required to think; 
woe be unto his immortal part if he 
did. There came into his savage life 
a long roll of new wants and new 
fears. He learned the taste of beef, 
and thereafter the lizard escaped. 
The pulpy mission grape dwelt long 
upon his palate, and the herbs went 
ungathered and the roots undigged. 
When he wanted any of these new 
things he asked and was told how he 
might acquire them: not by manufac- 
ture or the knowledge of any process, 
but at the hands of those fathers of good, the Padres. 
Every Sunday he got them, even without asking, if he 
had been good. 

More than two generations passed, and then the 
Californian had practically forgotten how his fathers 
had lived. New^ wants had been invented and new 
habits formed. The old would not do, and the new 
he could not furnish for himself unaided. He was a 
child, needing every day advice, direction and care. 
His barbarian independence was gone, but he had not 




BABY AND CRADLE. 



222 THE ORIGINAL CALIFOKIVIAN. 

acquired the secrets of civilization. Here and there 
wandered the sandaled monks, directing, correcting, 
controlling, governing, as fathers among children, 
enforcing the law of conscience, administering the 
rule of right, always respected as the dispensers of a 
wisdom supernatural to untutored minds, and as the 
doers of a justice between man and man that even 
children might perfectly understand. Among all ques- 
tionings and doubts upon whatsoever points, it has 
never been alleged that the Franciscan friars were not 
beloved of their people. The great Church they served 
unbends among the lowly, and becomes the Church 
of whatever tribe or race once admits its messengers. 
And these messengers, Franciscan or Jesuit, without 
homes or wives or loves, consecrated in a truer sense 
than Protestantism can know to the work upon which 
they have been sent, live and die content among those 
to whom they have once borne that imperative mes- 
sage which they have not failed to deliver even 
through flame and torture. 

Then came that time, heart-breaking, we may 
guess, which is expressed by the saddest word in the 
vocabulary of that California that was, and that will 
never again be. Sequestration, long dreaded and 
long averted, came at last in the form of law. It 
was, in a political and economical sense, right. The 
Mexican government merely carried out the inten- 
tion of the ancient and decaying power whose suc- 
cessor it was, and no government, however wedded 
to that ancient idea of the union of Church and 
State the fallacy of which was first perceived by the 
framers of the American constitution, could long 



THE ORIGIXAL CALIFORNIAN. 



223 



endure that a whole province should practically be 
administered by the Church alone. The ten years 
originally agreed upon had been prolonged to seven 
times ten. The turn of the State was long overdue. 
Sequestration meant the reversion of the lands until 
then used, but never owned by the missions, to the 
commonwealth, the making of the mission churches 
into parish churches, of the mission 
settlements into pueblos; "towns," 
and of the Indians into citizens. 
It was, and has always been, and 
will ever be, contrary to the internal 
and enduring idea of the Church 
herself, but, as in Mexico and Italy 
in still later times, and in laws for 
which the South California seques- 
tration was but a shadow, she will 
find herself continually opposed by 
those kingdoms of the earth which 
have not yet entirely become the 
kingdoms of the Lord and of His 
righteousness. 

Yet was sequestration in California based upon a 
primal error so serious that it almost obliterates the 
wonderful story of the missions, and gives us pause 
as to why they should have ever been. This error 
consisted in the supposition that in the Indian dwelt 
the capacity for becoming a citizen. The law of 
sequestration was the decree of his orphanage. Cast 
again upon the world which had once been his home, 
all his new wants aggravating the misery of a savage 
life, unable longer to avail himself of the advantages 




MOJAVE GIRL. 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIA N. 225 

of the life of either savage or citizen, he died, and 
continues to die, until, of all the swarthy hosts that 
watched from their hills the coming of the cross- 
bearers, scarce enough are left to furnish ethnology 
a clue. The ready victim of disease, and the pre- 
destined of extermination, small-pox alone has laid 
them by hundreds in unknown graves. The few 
instances of reversion to almost absolute savagery 
have been the only exceptions to that ancient rule 
which has worked with as perfect a certainty as any 
rule applied to human nature ever can, and which 
embodies an aw^ful alternative. Convert the Amer- 
ican savage; even change his life by the preliminaries 
and preparations without actually converting him; 
and you kill him. Leave him alone, and you also 
leave unchanged the fiat which dooms his soul. 

Sequestration ended the days of the most perfect 
form of the Kingdom of Righteousness, at least from 
a churchman's view-point, which, so far, it has been 
permitted to the world to see since Saul, the son of 
Kish, became the heir of the Hebrew theocracy. 
The Franciscans must have had their natural and 
human view of the situation. They saw blasted not 
only the present situation, but future hopes. One by 
one, or by twos and threes, they went away never to 
return. Following the act, and between it and the 
deed, came all the proverbial evils of Spanish admin- 
istration. To go, and go quickly, was the end of the 
prayers and toils and hopes of Fray Junipero Serra. 

There is a reason, perhaps, embodied in these few 
weeks or months of final waiting, why mission life is 
a blank as to all the details which go to make up a 



2 26 THE ORIGINAL CALIFCRNIAiY. 

picture. If there are diaries, journals, personal nar- 
ratives, hints, descriptions, they are lost. It was not 
the intention that they should be preserved. Perhaps 
ever}^ cowled brother of them, sinking again into the 
brown ranks of his order, leaving his soul's children 
to wander and starve after a fatherhood that had 
become traditional, abandoning forever the fair land 
that had witnessed the peaceful triumph of his faith, 
wished in his heart that the California missions had 
never been. He said: " Even so does man work, and 
with God is the result. Let us go." Then came the 
secular parish priests, without flocks almost from the 
beginning of their pastorates, and amid silence, isola- 
tion and quick decay, an unholy miracle of disappear- 
ance seems to have been wrought whereby the pre- 
cious vessels of the sanctuary, the sacred jewelry 
which showed the exquisite handiwork of the past, 
the vessels of the temple, were coined into sordid half- 
dollars. The reign of neglect and decay which con- 
tinues yet then began, until now, in this good year 
1889, the w^anderer of another race and an alien faith 
sees around him somewhat of that which has been 
imperfectly described in these pages. There is no 
past, yet that wdiich we call the past cannot be 
recalled. Let the visitor to California remember, 
carelessly perhaps, yet still remember, that about 
him lie the ruins of that time which is the connecting 
link between a past so remote that about it hangs 
a mist which is like the purple vail of the Califor- 
nian hills, and that wonderful present which even 
they who see may not believe in, so much is it like the 



THE ORIGINAL CALIFORNIAN. 22/ 

rubbing of the lamp, so nearly the reality of an 
Arabian tale. 

The Original Californian, embodying- the face, habits and prociivities of 
the earlier time, may now only be caught in glimpses and shadows. What 
may sometimes have become of him, and what reversion may occur in the 
moral status of even him who was specifically known as a " Mission Indian," 
is curiously illustrated by the following excerpt from a California newspaper 
of very recent date: 

" Mr. C. L. Bacheller, United States Master in Chancery, is engaged in 
taking testimony in a very important case, which will be decided by the 
United States Circuit Court. It is the case of John Morongo and other Mis- 
sion Indians as wards of the United States, against John G. North and 
Richard Gird, to quiet the title to 45,000 acres of land in San Bernardino 
county, claimed by the Indians as a part of their reservation, and by defend- 
ants under a grant to them from the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. 
The land in dispute is alleged by plaintiffs to be a part of the Potrero reser- 
vation and is very valuable. The witnesses for the plaintiff attract a good 
deal of attention, and are curiosities in themselves. Deputy United States 
Marshal R. J. Dominguez had along hunt for them in the Yuma desert, where 
the thermometer stood 120 degrees in the shade. These witnesses, five in 
number, are Indians, and the j^oungest is 75 years and the oldest 120. The 
oldest man, Juan Saberia, is supposed to be the oldest Indian alive in the 
United States. He was 12 years old when the old Mission San Gabriel was 
built, and saw it at the time. Another Indian, Juan Cahuilla, is about 115 
years old. Harabisio Cabazon, the chief of the whole tribe, is 80 years old. 
He is the son of the old chief who died four years ago at the age of 140. 
F"rancisco Apache is 105 years old. He is said to have been given his surname 
when he married an Apache woman. He also says that he saw the Old Mis- 
sion church when it was built. Since then he has been on the warpath 
several times, in Arizona. Ramon Largo, the next in age, saj'S he is 104 years 
old. The Mission was built when he was born. He is another warrior and 
has been on the warpath several times. These specimens of aged humanity 
were brought here to testify to the length of time the Indians have been in 
possession of the lands claimed, and the defendants will have a hard time in 
obtaining witnesses who will go back further in their recollections. Recently 
they have been living in the desert under the mesquite trees on pecJiete^ or the 
bean of the tree. They have white beards and grizzled hair and are queer 
looking individuals." 



Joaqtiin Miller s Great Story. 



TH 



A lANITES OF 

THE ^lERRAS 



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